t consummation of death, the penny tricks
with bells and banjos, the circus-like tables and anthropomorphic Edens.
Yet, so far as the phrase goes, there is something in it; but whatever
that is, lies in demonstrable science, the investigations of the
subconscious by Freud and Jung.

McGeorge himself, a reporter with a sufficient education in the actual,
tried to repeat impartially, with the vain illusion of an open mind,
what he had been told; but it was clear that his power of reasoning had
been disarranged. We were sitting in the Italian restaurant near his
paper to which he had conducted me, and he was inordinately troubled by
flies. A small, dark man, he was never without a cigarette; he had
always been nervous, but I had no memory of such uneasiness as he now
exhibited.

"It's rather dreadful," he said, gazing at me for an instant, and then
shifting his glance about the white plaster walls and small flock of
tables, deserted at that hour. "I mean this thing of not really
dying--hanging about in the wind, in space. I used to have a natural
dread of death; but now I'm afraid of--of keeping on. When you think of
it, a grave's quite a pleasant place. It's restful. This other--" He
broke off, but not to eat.

"My editor," he began anew, apparently at a tangent, "wouldn't consider
it. I was glad. I'd like to forget it, go back. There might be a story
for you."

Whatever he had heard in connection with the Meeker circle, I assured
him, would offer me nothing; I didn't write that sort of thing.

"You'd appreciate Lizzie Tuoey," he asserted.

McGeorge had been sent to the Meeker house to unearth what he could
about the death of Mrs. Kraemer. He described vividly the location,
which provided the sole interest to an end admitted normal in its main
features. It was, he said, one of those vitrified wildernesses of brick
that have given the city the name of a place of homes; dreadful. Amazing
in extent, it was without a single feature to vary the monotony of
two-storied dwellings cut into exact parallelograms by paved streets;
there was a perspective of continuous facades and unbroken tin roofs in
every direction, with a grocery or drug-store and an occasional saloon
at the corners, and beyond the sullen red steeple of a church.

Dusk was gathering when McGeorge reached the Meekers. It was August, and
the sun had blazed throughout the day, with the parching heat; the smell
of brick dust and scorched tin was hideous. His