here 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.

Two months after Jenny's death, having spoken at a great meeting on some
momentous question of the hour, he found himself the acknowledged leader
of the Radical, rather forlorn, hope in Coalchester, and before long
invitations were coming to him to help on the same hope in other towns.
Never in his life--and he used often to meditate on the fa