d end. No
passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had
survived and maundered and pined, but where had been _his_ deep ravage?
The extraordinary thing we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of
this question. The sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in
letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and
what he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark
themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen _outside_ of his
life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had
been loved for herself: such was the force of his conviction of the
meaning of the stranger's face, which still flared for him as a smoky
torch. It hadn't come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience;
it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of
chance, the insolence of accident. Now that the illumination had begun,
however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there
gazing at was the sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in
pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper
incision than ever the open page of his story. The name on the table
smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what it said to
him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed. This was the
awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread
clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone beneath him. Everything
fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all
stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked
for he had met with a vengeance--he had emptied the cup to the lees; he
had been the man of his time, _the_ man, to whom nothing on earth was to
have happened. That was the rare stroke--that was his visitation. So he
saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted. So
_she_ had seen it while he didn't, and so she served at this hour to
drive the truth home. It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all
the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion. This the
companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then
offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was
never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had
seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.

The escape would have been to lov