When the train actually came in, and he held her at arm’s length with both his hands, clutching her wrists almost fiercely, looking her up and down almost irritably, he recognized in a flash that existence without her, however adventurous it might be, would always be half-real⁠ ⁠… just as those famous Ramsgard “Slopes” up there had seemed half-real a few minutes ago!

It was she alone who could give the bittersweet tang of reality to his phantasmal life and make the ground under his feet firm.

Her coming, now, as of old, had done, at this moment, just this very thing!

As he looked upon her now⁠—that gallant, ruddy, handsome face, those proud lips, those strong, white teeth, that wavy mass of splendid, grey hair⁠—he felt that, though he might love other persons for other reasons, it was she alone who made the world he lived in solid and resistant to the touch. He felt that without her the whole thing might split and tear⁠—as if it had been made of thin paper!