The intense reality of Mr. Malakite’s figure beneath those bedclothes, of his beard above them, of his nostrils, his old-man’s eyelids, his ugly beast-ears, narrowed the reality of his own life, with its gathered memories, into something as concrete, tangible, compact, as the bony knuckles of his own gaunt hands now resting upon his protruding knees! Thought? It was “thought,” of course! But not thought in the abstract. It was the thought of a tree, of a snake, of an ox, of a man, a man begotten, a man conceived, a man like enough to die tomorrow! With what within him had he felt that shrewd thrust just now about his truelove Chris? Not with any “glassy essence.” Simply with his vegetable-animal integrity, with his life , as a tree would feel the loss of its companion⁠ ⁠… as a beast the loss of its mate!