Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping

None the less, when Kit came down to Winstonbury for a week-end the whole of Sorrell's consciousness would be exposed like a sensitive plate hidden behind a lens, ready to register every secret impression.

One winter morning while Sorrell was tying his tie in front of his cottage window, he had one of those moments of illumination, for the world outside his window seemed more real than reality. Real because he saw it in a sudden garment of mystery, and the dimness of the dawn, grey, gradual, yet like the soul of itself, a moon still shining somewhere upon the leafless trees, the grass frosted between night and dawn. The illusion of the material reality departed from him while he stood there. It was as though everything was spirit. He felt the beauty of feeling and of seeing as he did, the illimitable significance of the human interplay. All was gradualness and growth, and no measure of worrying could make a tree shoot its leaves in winter. The seasons came and went, but all that a man loved went on, like the sap, sleeping or rising.