giant
shadow looming through the mist reminded him of the Roman Colisseum seen
in a like aspect, the resemblance being accentuated in his imagination
by the Stadium's vast silence, by its rows upon rows of ghostly gray
sedilia looking down on a haunted, empty ring. His thoughts strayed to
Rome, to Cairo, to Calcutta, to Singapore, to the stages of those two
patient journeys round the world, made from a sense of duty, in search
of a widening of that sheerly human knowledge which life had hitherto
denied him. Having started from London and got back to London again, he
saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he
had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and
more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon,
and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of
appreciation of which he read in books.

In his way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady
gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre
Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the
same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which
was the primary object of his quest. He learned to recognize the beauty
of a picture or a mountain more or less at sight; but the soul of these
things, of which he thought more than of their outward aspects, the soul
that looks through the eyes and speaks with the tongues of peoples,
remained inaccessible to his yearnings. He was always outside--never
more than a tourist. He made acquaintances by the wayside easily enough,
but only of the rootless variety, beginning without an introduction and
ending without a farewell. There was nothing that "belonged" to him,
nothing to which he himself "belonged."

It was the persistency of the defect that had marked most of his life,
even that portion of it spent in Boston and Waverton--the places he
called "home." He was their citizen only by adoption, as only by
adoption he was the son of Tom and Sarah Davenant. That intimate
claim--the claim on the family, the claim on the soil--which springs of
birth and antedates it was not his, and something had always been
lacking to his life because of the deficiency. Too healthily genial to
feel this want more than obscurely, he nevertheless had tried to remedy
it by resorting to the obvious means. He had tried to fall in love, with
a view to marriage and a family. Once, perhaps twice