It was as if the spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too precipitate revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.
Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where he rested, Marius had an unexpected delay.

He sat down in an olive-garden, and, all around him and within still turning to reverie, the course of his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some other world, disparted from this spectacular point where he was now placed to survey it, like that distant road below, along which he had travelled this morning across the Campagna.

Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers.

That prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it was as if he must look round for some one [67] else to share his joy with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief.
Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey.

And was it only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude he had which in spite of ardent friendship perhaps loved best of all things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was there at all?
Must not the whole world around have faded away for him altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?
In his deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment.