Those things take your attention.

You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write letters beginning "Yours of the 17th inst.

rec'd and contents duly noted." But to work with your hands all day, thinking and singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness of your friend's greeting--always there--for you! Who would wake from such a dream as this?
Dawn and the sea--music in moonlit gardens--nightingales serenading through almond-groves in bloom--what could bring such things into the city's turmoil?
Yet they are here, and roses blossom in the soot.

That is what it means not to be alone! That is what a friend gives you! Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed a somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his own (and perhaps Mary's) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan to sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light heart.
His cheerfulness was vaguely diminished by the troublous state of affairs of his family.

He had recognized his condition when he wrote, "Who would wake from such a dream as this ?" Bibbs was a sympathetic person, easily touched, but he was indeed living in a dream, and all things outside of it were veiled and remote--for that is the way of youth in a dream.