Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child.  Sorrow, too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy.  Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul.  The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world.  Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much—­but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars.  It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds.  The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.

No consciousness of his gifts had ever given Theophil any such sense of his belonging to the chosen and dedicated minority of mankind as this initiation into the Secret Society of Sorrow.  He had been chosen to represent a sacred order.  He stood for no lesser interests than those of Love and Death.  Though he were to represent Coalchester in the House of Commons, what honour were there in that to one already so mysteriously honoured?

Tears bring a strange new sight to the eyes, and “a new perception both of grieving love” made Theophil see, and love to see, many things in the world he had never noticed before.  His eyes were opened to behold the many mourners who go about the streets, the widows who walk in darkness, and all the shapes of blackness moving phantom-like through the coloured traffic; not all true children of sorrow, indeed, though wearing its habit, but, true or not, symbols of the power and majesty of death in the world.  For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye; and as some funeral cortege passed like a dream, Charon’s barge amid all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages of the king.  For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal gratitude.  And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that phantom procession in the streets.

Once, as he passed along the High Street, he had noticed a crowd round a dying horse.  He stood with the crowd a moment, and then went on his way.  In an hour’s time he repassed the place, and there was the dead horse lying solitary on the side of the street; but he noted with a curious gladness that some hand had covered it reverently with a horse-cloth.  “So honoured is death,” he mused to himself, “that even the humblest animal on which he shall have set his seal is held sacred from the common day, and shall not be gazed upon heedlessly by the passer-by.”  This seemed the greatest honour he had known paid to the king!