It was, he told himself, as if the foreign tongue which he had so wearily heard on every side of him, for so long, had suddenly translated itself into intelligibility, or as if the text beneath the pictures in those ubiquitous illustrated papers from Paris, which he had studied so blankly and so blindly, had suddenly become as plain as his own English to him.
But his moment of exaltation, his mood of careless emancipation, was a brief one.

He was no longer alone in life.

His bitterness of heart had blinded him to obligations.

He had not yet fathomed the mystery of Frank's appearance.

He had not yet even made sure of her relapse.
Above all, he had not put forth a hand to help her in what might be an inexplicable extremity.