Once this disturbing summons to his life was merely disquieting and unformulated, but gradually now it assumed a shape more urgent and more definite.

Haunting him with the sense of the unfulfilled, the face of Mary Ellen was ever in the shadow; of Mary Ellen, who had sent him away forever; of Mary Ellen, who was wasting her life on a prairie ranch, with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her soul.

That this rare plant should thus fail and wither seemed to him a crime quite outside his own personal concern.
This unreal Mary Ellen, this daily phantom, which hung faces on bare walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some message for him.

Yet had he not had his final message from the actual Mary Ellen?
And, after all, did anything really matter any more?
So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life.

This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy.