It suffers from spleen somewhat frequently--but that is gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet him in that mood.

He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in which he is very fascinating.

How seldom he lapses into a blustering manner, after all! And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately enough, one may go out and kill something.

But his fine days are the best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse--even to dream; in fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous and serene weather.
That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising of intellectual prospects.

For a companion I had found a book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day--a fine-weather book, simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend.