He had in general little taste for the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something of that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to an ache that begins to succumb to treatment.

To the treatment of time the malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him.

The day was written for him there on which he had first become acquainted with death, and the successive phases of the acquaintance were marked each with a flame.
The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had entered that dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day.

It was only yesterday that Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire; yet already there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer to him by entering this company.

He went over it, head by head, till he felt like the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd's vision of differences imperceptible.