Dubliners The Dead by James Joyce

Later, Gabriel watches her sleep. He feels insignificant in her life; a man died for her love. He knows also that they have aged. The face she has now is not "the face for which Michael Furey had braved death" (223). He thinks about mortality, and his two lovely old aunts. Soon, he'll return to that house for their funerals. He feels the power of Furey's passion; he has never felt something like that for a woman. He feels the shadow of mortality on all of them. Outside, it snows. As it blankets all things without discrimination, it reminds Gabriel of mortality: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (225).