Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in shining possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the morning light and the waking headache reveal his illusion.

Some kind of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast tied to his heartstrings.

But as grief must be fed with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that ravening passion.

To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all the mental machinery into disorder.
Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already fought, and that he had conquered.

He believed that he had subdued himself completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow of disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own larger being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of apprehending.
He had deceived himself.