It came to him suddenly, also, that Jacqueline had never heard him speak.

Well, he would speak to her to-night.
His was an universal mind.

On occasion he could stoop to praise one party and vituperate another, but that was his tongue serving his worldly interest.

The man himself dealt with humanity, wherever found and in whatever time, however differentiated, however allied, with its ancestry of the brute and its destiny of the spirit; with the root of the tree and the far-off flower and every intermediate development of stem and leaf; with the soil that sustained the marvellous growth, and with the unknown Gardener who for an unfathomable purpose had set the inexplicable seed in an unthinkable universe.

From the ephemera to the star he accepted and conjectured, and while he often thought ill of the living, he had never yet thought ill of life.