Here was the clear, cold corrective, which the fever of his present life demanded.

Without it, he would have felt alternately suffocated and exhausted by an existence, at once so gaudy and overdone, and yet so intolerably empty; in which people, even at their best, seemed only to be brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a world's disillusion.

For with all the severity of Cornelius, there was such a breeze of hopefulness--freshness and hopefulness, as of new morning, about him.

[233] For the most part, as I said, those refusals, that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable.

But there were cases where the unknown monitor acted in a direction with which the judgment, or instinct, of Marius himself wholly concurred; the effective decision of Cornelius strengthening him further therein, as by a kind of outwardly embodied conscience.