It almost seemed as if the shock might make a man of Wentworth.
Did he half know (he was certainly always tacitly guarding himself against the assumption of such an idea in the minds of others) that he had so far been left out, not only from the whirl of life--he had deliberately withdrawn from that--but from the weft of life itself.

The great loom had not swept him in.

It had not appeared to need him.

Some of us seem to hang on the fringe of life, of thought, of love, of everything.

We are not for good or ill interwoven into the stuff, part of the pattern.
Wentworth felt young for the first time in his life, happy for the first time in his life, really energetic for the first time.