He had had the clearness of vision to discover what she was … behind her half-dyed grey hair and terrible ill-fitting teeth. Glorious. Into the midst of her failing experiment, at the very moment when the shadow of oncoming age was making it visibly tragic, had come this man in his youth, clear-sighted and determined, seeing her as his happiness, his girl. She was a girl, modest and good. … Circumstances could do nothing. There as she stood at bay in the midst of them, the thing she believed in, her one test of everything in life, always sure of her defence and the shelter of her curious little iron strength, had come again to her herself, all her own … it was the unasked reward of her unswerving faith. She stood decorated by a miracle.
Mrs. Bailey had triumphed; justified her everlasting confident smile.
She was enviable; her qualities blazoned by success in a competition whose judges, being blind, never failed in discovery. …
But the miracle gleams only for a moment, and the personal life, no longer threading its way in a wonderful shining mysteriously continuous and decisive pattern freely in and out of the worldwide everything, is henceforth labelled and exposed, repeating until the eye wearies of its fixity, one little lustreless shape; and the outside world is left untouched and unchanged. Is it worth while? A blind end, in which death swiftly increases. … But without it, in the end, there is no shape at all?
The hour had been such a surprising success because of a smattering of knowledge : until the moment when he had said I have always from the first been interested in philosophy. Then knowing that the fascinating thing was philosophy and being ignorant of philosophy, brought the certainty of being unable to keep pace. … Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels, with its terrible known name at last and disappeared in the same moment forever away into the lives of people who were free to study. … But if,