at the end, one was not alive enough to be conscious of what one was
leaving, not alive enough even to care. If he had been able to take in
the presence of his young wife, able to realise that he was looking at
her face, touching her for the last time--it would have been hell; if he
had been up to realising sunlight, moonlight, the sound of the world's
life outside, the softness of the bed he lay on--it would have meant the
most poignant anguish of defraudment. Life was a rare good thing, and
to be squashed out of it with your powers at full, a wretched mistake in
Nature's arrangements, a wretched villainy on the part of Man--for his
own death, like all those other millions of premature deaths, would have
been due to the idiocy and brutality of men! He could smile now, with
Gratian looking down at him, but the experience had heaped fuel on a
fire which had always smouldered in his doctor's soul against that half
emancipated breed of apes, the human race. Well, now he would get a few
days off from his death-carnival! And he lay, feasting his returning
senses on his wife. She made a pretty nurse, and his practised eye
judged her a good one--firm and quiet.

George Laird was thirty. At the opening of the war he was in an East-End
practice, and had volunteered at once for service with the Army. For the
first nine months he had been right up in the thick of it. A poisoned
arm; rather than the authorities, had sent him home. During that leave
he married Gratian. He had known the Piersons some time; and, made
conscious of the instability of life, had resolved to marry her at the
first chance he got. For his father-in-law he had respect and liking,
ever mixed with what was not quite contempt and not quite pity. The
blend of authority with humility, cleric with dreamer, monk with artist,
mystic with man of action, in Pierson, excited in him an interested, but
often irritated, wonder. He saw things so differently himself, and had
little of the humorous curiosity which enjoys what is strange simply
because it is strange. They could never talk together without soon
reaching a point when he wanted to say: "If we're not to trust our
reason and our senses for what they're worth, sir--will you kindly tell
me what we are to trust? How can we exert them to the utmost in some
matters, and in others suddenly turn our backs on them?" Once, in one
of their discussions, which often bordered on acrimony, he had expounded
himself at length.