He looked at the rose and he looked at the garden, on which lay the first
clear rays of the rising sun. In him stirred a rare wistfulness, a rare
melancholy. For to him all the gentler, softer forms of sorrow were rare.
In the last year he had suffered, but in his own way--rigidly, coldly,
unbendingly. His lips, even in the loneliness of his own room, had always
been tight closed over the smothered exclamation of pain. He had gone on
steadily and conscientiously with his work. He had never for one moment
"given way to himself," as he expressed it. But this morning he was in
the power of that strange "atmosphere"--call it what you will--which we
feel when still only half awake, and which, independent of all outward
circumstances, destines our day's mood of cheerfulness or depression.
Strangely enough, he had made no struggle against it--he had yielded to
it with a sense of inevitableness.
The inevitable compassed him about and numbed his stern, merciless
system of self-repression. Fate, irresistible and unchangeable,
obscured the clear path of duty which he had marked out for himself,
and held him for the moment her passive victim. It was no idle fancy.
He was not a man in whose thought-world fancy played any part. Nor was
it the gloomy impression which a lonely twilight might have stamped
upon a mind already burdened with a heavy weight of trouble. The young
day spread her halo of pure sunshine over a world of color; the red
rose upon his table bowed her head toward him in the perfection of a
mature beauty which as yet hid no warning of decay.
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