There was a suggestion of the fundamental and the normal, as if perhaps movement and sound were, after all, no better than interruptions; as if this fixed poise of nature were something complete in itself; as if these trees hung out their leaves to listen to something that they could actually hear, as if these motionless creatures of the woodland were looking upon something that they could actually see; as if there were some great secret actually present and displayed in dead silence and invisibility before those only who possessed the senses necessary to perceive it.
* * * * * It was odd to regard life from this standpoint--to look back upon the days and their incidents that were past, forward upon the days and incidents to come.

Again it was possible for Frank to look upon these things as an outsider and a deliberate critic--as he had done in the stuffy room of the lodging-house in the town.

Yet now, though he was again an outsider, though he was again out of the whirl of actual living, he seemed to be looking at things--staring out, as he was, almost unseeingly at the grass slopes before him--from exactly the opposite side.

Then, they had seemed to him the only realities, these tangible physical things, and all else illusion: now it was the physical things that were illusive, and something else that was real.

Once again the two elements of life lay detached--matter and spirit; but it was as obviously now spirit that was the reality as it had been matter a day or two before.