He passed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it did not of necessity. He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now. He saw again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that physical passion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from it, his effort to break away. He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had strengthened--the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had whispered to him.... What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after? He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that curtain. He went on passing again through his life, and he saw the harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase, when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes and working out of them had filled the hours--still with Nicky as the chief personal interest.