Already his profession had clothed him in black, and it was only for him that his black seemed now to gain a deeper distinction; but such ugly symbols of beautiful memory as that note-paper whose diminishing edge of blackness is rather a cynical witness of a graduated forgetfulness, were not for a real grief like his.

As if sorrow, while it may and will change, can ever end! Why, in the world of faithful hearts, men and women have not yet dried their tears for Romeo and Juliet! Theophil conceived this grief that had come to him as one more activity added to his life till life should end.

He knew that it would not outcast joy, but that it would live side by side with it, that it must alternate with joy for it to go on living.

Jenny's death was not going to be less sad, less a factor of the eternal tragedy, at the end of a year,--that he might go to a theatre once more, as some widows joyously don colours, when the clock strikes the end of a year of lost dances.
For it was not Jenny alone that had died, but it was a consolation to Theophil in those hours of self-torture which are among the earliest and most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had died with her, after all.

It was not merely the apathy of the first weeks that told him this, the sense of vacuity, of uselessness in all things, but the sense that never left him, even when he had awakened to an activity he had never known before, that nothing really mattered, however vigorously he might seem to act to the contrary, since Jenny had gone.
It was with difficulty sometimes that he could take important issues with necessary seriousness, for, whatever the odds of life henceforward might be, what was there worth gaining now that Jenny was lost?
Could any energy or haste save Jenny from dying?
That had happened.