When we have fallen through storey after storey of
our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it
is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they
stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how,
linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential
circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary
life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices
that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when
such a pin falls out - when there vanishes in the least breath of
time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our
supply - when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the
faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard
with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a
breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole
wing of the palace of our life.
III
One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of
us labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in
person, most serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words
and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the
air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to
the poorest student gentle and attentive.
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