nter with
death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.
She said you might miss everything else irrevocable and vital--falling
in love, having children, accomplishing anything--but that sooner or
later you have to reckon with losing somebody dear to you." She spoke
with an academic interest in the question.

"I should think," meditated Page, taking the matter into serious
consideration, "that the vitalness of even that experience would
depend somewhat on the character undergoing it. I've known some
temperaments of a proved frivolity which seemed to have passed through
it without any great modifications. But then I know nothing about it
personally. I lost my father before I could remember him, and since
then I haven't happened to have any close encounter with such loss. My
mother, you know, is very much alive."

"Well, I haven't any personal experience with death in my immediate
circle either," said Sylvia. "But I wasn't brought up with the usual
cult of the awfulness of it. Father was always anxious that we
children should feel it something as natural as breathing--you are
dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours
you back. If you've been worth living, there are more elements of
fineness in humanity."

Page nodded. "Yes, that's what they all say nowadays. Personal
immortality is as out of fashion as big sleeves."

"Do you believe it?" asked Sylvia, seeing the talk take an intimate
turn, "or are you like me, and don't know at all what you do believe?"
If she had under this pseudo-philosophical question a veiled purpose
analogous to that of the less subtle charmer whose avowed expedient
is to get "a man to talk about himself" the manoeuver was eminently
successful.

"I've never had the least chance to think about it," he said, sitting
up, "because I've always been so damnably beset by the facts of
living. I know I am not the first of my race to feel convinced that
his own problems are the most complicated, but ..."

"_Yours!_" cried Sylvia, genuinely astonished.

"And one of the hardships of my position," he told her at once with
a playful bitterness, "is that everybody refuses to believe in the
seriousness of it. Because my father, after making a great many bad
guesses as to the possible value of mining stock in Nevada, happened
to make a series of good guesses about the value of mining stock in
Colorado, it is assumed that all questions are settled for me, that