Now, however, he seemed to have realised in a moment by what common means Nature is able to impeach this treason of aloofness. He had held himself a thing altogether apart in that conflict of blurred, indefinite forms. He had been like a spectator watching an illuminated sheet at an entertainment, when (to adopt a modern image) there had sounded in an instant the click of the cinematograph snapping the blur into focus, and, lo! he beheld his own figure active amongst the crowd, a constituent atom travelling through or with it, a mean, small condition of its gregariousness--repellent, attractive, infinitesimally influential, according to the common degree of his kind. Holding his soul, as he fancied, veracious and remote, he had seen it magnetic, in its supposed isolation, to another that, in its essential guile, in its infirmity and untruth, would seem to be his spirit’s actual antithesis, yet whose destinies, rebel as he might, must henceforth for evermore be associated with his. He was no amateur counsel to a recording angel, in fact, but just a human organism subject to the influences of neighbour temperaments. Now, the considerable but lesser pang in this shock to his pride of solitariness was felt in the realisation of his impotence to claim exemption from the ordinary vulgar taxes imposed by the gods upon vulgar animal instincts. He must be sought if he would not seek; nor could he by any means escape the penalties of his manly attributes. He was a thing of desire; therefore he represented the one moiety of the race to which he would have fain considered himself an alien. But he did not regard with any present sentiment but that of anger the woman who had thus been the means to his proper understanding of his own personal insignificance. For her sex, indeed, he had no natural liking but that negatively conveyed in a sort of chivalrous contempt for its inconsequence (whereby--though he did not know it--he may have offered himself an unconscious Bertram to a score of Helenas). Now, to find his austere particular self made the object of a sacrifice of utter truth and decency, both alarmed and disgusted him. The very jar of the discovery tumbled him from cloud to earth. Yet, be it said, if it brought him with a run from his removed heights, he was to fall into that garden of the world where the loves, their thighs yellow with pollen, flutter from flower to flower.