Theophil conceived this grief that had come to him as one more activity added to his life till life should end.  He knew that it would not outcast joy, but that it would live side by side with it, that it must alternate with joy for it to go on living.  Jenny’s death was not going to be less sad, less a factor of the eternal tragedy, at the end of a year,—­that he might go to a theatre once more, as some widows joyously don colours, when the clock strikes the end of a year of lost dances.

For it was not Jenny alone that had died, but it was a consolation to Theophil in those hours of self-torture which are among the earliest and most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had died with her, after all.  It was not merely the apathy of the first weeks that told him this, the sense of vacuity, of uselessness in all things, but the sense that never left him, even when he had awakened to an activity he had never known before, that nothing really mattered, however vigorously he might seem to act to the contrary, since Jenny had gone.

It was with difficulty sometimes that he could take important issues with necessary seriousness, for, whatever the odds of life henceforward might be, what was there worth gaining now that Jenny was lost?  Could any energy or haste save Jenny from dying?  That had happened.  The worst had happened.  All the terror life had to appal the human spirit had been faced, in that moment when the doctor’s hand upon his shoulder had told him Jenny was to die.  His eyes had looked on the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest to stone, and he was no longer vulnerable humanity.

On the battle-field of existence he bore a charmed life, and sometimes as he moved among his fellows he felt a certain sense of the unfairness of his advantage in this respect, and paused to pity those who could still be so eager, so tragically set upon, this little issue.  The virulence of those enemies whom he was already making and who were to multiply as his activities awakened again, seemed particularly pathetic, and he would smile in sad amusement at their quaint little efforts to hurt him. (No man is so strong for this world’s fight as he who has laid up his treasure in heaven; and when the mystic condescends to the common trades of life he is an easy master.) It meant so much to them, so little to him.  He was a humbug, he was a hypocrite, he wasn’t even a good speaker, he was an ignoramus!  Was he?  All right.  They might think so if they chose.  It hardly interested him.  He had been sitting drawing angels, and somehow their irrelevant voices had broken in upon him.  “Another was with me.”

Really, even for Jenny’s sake, it seemed hardly worth while to fight so poor a world!  Was the fame that such a world could give a distinction one would seek for Jenny?  Would not Jenny smile in heaven at the toy honours of such a world?

On the other hand, there was something repellent to his once ambitious soul, in the thought that such a world might seem to have the victory; and, therefore, when the first numbness had left him and the colours and sounds of things were once more coming back, he threw himself with galvanic vitality into the work that lay to his hand, and particularly into those political activities for which his gift of speech and his power of organisation fitted him.