Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,--these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity.

But his interest in his particular _role_ had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a repressed and hidden energy.

He had learnt in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want.

And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle.

The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone.