The dark old room, with its mildewing wainscot, became full of ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant.  And these did but give place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls, to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more:  the faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the round accusation of futility brought by the rest.  They were part of his introspection, all those—­he was not sick enough to hold them real—­but nevertheless they gave him food for much vigilant thought, which came back always to the great interest of his life.  Futility!  Did she too, the beloved woman, point an accusing finger, casting back at him a sacrifice which, certainly, in his then disability seemed to him vain enough?  For all his goodwill, had he gained any more for her than a short respite, the temporal reconstruction of a fading illusion?—­and at what a price!  The irony of things was just then so present to him that he could readily believe he had done no more than that—­enough merely to embitter her knowledge when it should finally come.  And an old saying of Lady Garnett’s returned to him, which, at the time, he had disputed; but which struck him now with the sharp stab of an intimate truth.  “You could have prevented it, had you wished.”  Yes, he might have prevented it, if only he had foreseen; the wise old woman had not made a mistake.  And yet he had wished to prevent it, in a manner, only his colder second thoughts—­he made no allowance now for their generous intention—­had found propriety in the match, and his long habit of spectatorship had made the personal effort, which interference would have involved, impossible.

Harking back scrupulously to the remote days of Eve’s girlhood, his morbid recollection collected a variety of scattered threads, of dispersed signs and tokens, which led him to ask at last, with a gathering dread, whether he had not made a mistake, must not plead guilty to a charge of malingering, or, at least, of intellectual cowardice in acquiescing so supinely in defeat?

Was it true, then, that a man found in life very much what he brought to the search?

Certainly, the world was full of persons who had been broken on the wheel for their proper audacity, because they had sought so much more than was to be found; but might it not be equally true that one could err on the other side, expect, desire too little, less even than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of disappointment, the full measure of one’s reward?  Perhaps success in the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had so early acquired.