d actual satisfaction than he had
imagined, the moments of rapture were less glamorous.

Ishmael was one of those unlucky and rare people to whom everything has
lost poignancy when it is occurring not for the first time. He knew how
far dearer to him was Georgie than Blanche had ever been--how far more
lovable she was. But his love had not the keenness, the exquisite
sharpness, of the earlier love, because that first time had taken from
him what in spite of himself he could not give again. If Georgie had
left him he would not have suffered the agonies he had lived down after
Blanche had gone.

In the same way he loved Georgie incomparably more than Phoebe, and
between them passion was a deeper though not a sweeter thing; yet never
again was he to feel the abandon that had delighted and finally satiated
him with Phoebe. His relation towards any other human being could
never now stretch from rim to rim of the world for him as had so nearly
been the case when he loved Blanche. No one thing could seem to him to
overtop all others as he had tried to make it in the first months with
Phoebe.

As time went on there came about many measures of which he was as keen
an advocate as he had been of school reform and the ballot, yet never
did he recapture that first fine glow which had fired him at his entry
into the world of men who worked at these things. He believed as time
went on, more firmly, because more vitally, in God and the future of the
soul than ever he had in his fervid schooldays, yet these beliefs
aroused less enthusiasm of response within him.

He could still feel as strongly in body, soul or mind, but never did he
have those flashing periods when all three are fused together in that
one white passion of feeling which is the genius of youth. Always one of
the three stood aloof, the jarring spectator in the trinity, and
affected the quality of what the other two might feel. Life, as he went
through its midway, seemed to him to disintegrate, not to move
inevitably towards any one culmination of its varied pattern. When he
had been young he lived by what might happen any golden to-morrow; now
he lived by what did happen day by day.

BOOK IV

THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER I

QUESTIONS OF VISION

"I am getting on, you know," said Nicky Ruan. "At twenty-two--nearly
twenty-three--a fellow isn't as young as he was. And I don't want to
stick here till I'm too old to enjoy seeing the world."

"Wh