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"Shall you, indeed?" asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart

"It's very nice of you to say that"

"Oh no Ito look at life objectively

with ness in you What I chiefly

miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably

that is becausethe bestwith them are small If I had not the whole past

with ood company always?"

"Yes, in a sense it is The past is humanity set free from circumstance,

and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised"

As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville asps at response, and the old man continued: "What I

mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them

before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves

to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and

vital forces"

"Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair