The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him.

And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced.

How is it done?
he kept vaguely wondering.
How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race?
Presently--by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit--his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator.

The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward--towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests.

But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker--a bystander.