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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