to the common convention of emotional indifference to
most of the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing
and being pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of
people to one another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow
living.

4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.

For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to
possess any quality of terror. The experiment will be over, the rinsed
beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the
waste-pipe; the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths of those we love
are harder to understand or bear.

It happens that of those very intimate with me I have lost only one, and
that came slowly and elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought by
the accumulation of years and mental decay, but many close friends and
many whom I have counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have passed
out of my world. I miss such a one as Bob Stevenson, that luminous,
extravagant talker, that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever I
write. It is less pleasure now to write a story since he will never read
it, much less give me a word of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's
friendly laughter and Henley's exuberant welcome. They made a warmth
that has gone, those men. I can understand why I, with my fumbling
lucidities and explanations, have to finish up presently and go,
expressing as I do the mood of a type and of a time; but not those
radiant presences.

And the gap these men have left, these men with whom after all I only
sat now and again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got a letter from
at odd times, gives me some measure of the thing that happens, that may
happen, when the mind that is always near one's thoughts, the person who
moves to one's movement and lights nearly all the common flow of events
about one with the reminder of fellowship and meaning--ceases.

Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If
Faith has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft
and isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it
bleak and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual
interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met
and refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the
intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that
image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the