ing everything in the late February
afternoon, and the unseen violet refined itself through the air. It
was as if the spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too
precipitate revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.

Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where he
rested, Marius had an unexpected delay. He sat down in an
olive-garden, and, all around him and within still turning to reverie,
the course of his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some
other world, disparted from this spectacular point where he was now
placed to survey it, like that distant road below, along which he had
travelled this morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he
could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another
person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to
point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers. That
prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it
was as if he must look round for some one [67] else to share his joy
with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief.
Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this way or
that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or another
long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And was it only the
resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through his
memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not
been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude he
had which in spite of ardent friendship perhaps loved best of all
things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side
throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of
his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it? In his
deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment. It was as
if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side, visible
there across the plain, as he indulged his fancy. A bird came and sang
among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the
child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still
conspiring, he passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself,