If she was old, or
almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of
the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him. His
surprises began here; when once they had begun they multiplied;
they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddest way in
the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster,
for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in
general the unexpected has died out.
One of them was that he should have caught himself--for he HAD so
done--REALLY wondering if the great accident would take form now as
nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman,
this admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so
unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such
a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that
as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine
a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would
represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity
under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most
grotesques of failures.
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