It had been a turning of the page of the book of life--as if a leaf long inert had moved at a touch and, eagerly reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles.

To rifle the Golden Isles had, on the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of it--what was most wondrous of all--still more even in the thought than in the act.

The thought was that of the affinity of Genius, or at least of Taste, with something in himself--with the dormant intelligence of which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected him as changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual plane.

He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty--and he didn't after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators.

He had been nothing of that kind before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success; now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the immense meaning it had waited for.
It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife, when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had so broken--and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier occasion, the journey of his honeymoon year, it had still been closely covered.