on them?
There's no such laziness in nature. I don't say there aren't folk who live
their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never
moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N'York women--but they
don't count. They're against nature and I guess when they die they die,
for they haven't ever lived." Then, vehemently: "Of course, they come
back, not as ghosts peekin' about and making nuisances of themselves, but
they come back as people--which is the sensible way and there's nothing
unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don't say there aren't ghosts, there
are, for I've seen 'em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink,
as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn't
the making of a man, so he couldn't come back as a man, and he wasn't a
woman, so he couldn't come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He
was always an uneasy creature, else I don't suppose he'd have come back as
anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn't die, he gets a
new one, and when he wears out a body--which isn't a bit more than a suit
of clothes--he gets a new one. If he hasn't piled up grit enough in life
to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he's a ghost. That's
my way of thinking and I know--I know--n'matter."

She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring
weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent
of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few
feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very
breath of the southern spring.

It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the
loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song
of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.

Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away
from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old
garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no
matter how much you don't want to hear it--or tease you, if you are a
practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all
to do with "real" life.

It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been
working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the
song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of
things seen and uns