stbourne this afternoon in one of those little carriages? Are you the
man who's walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the
blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and
always there's a look of the sepulchral, something of the undertaker,
the coffin, and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me--but the
doors slammed. We shall never meet again. Moggridge, farewell!

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up to the top of the house. One moment I'll
linger. How the mud goes round in the mind--what a swirl these monsters
leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there,
striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit
sifts itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still, and
there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for
the souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets again.

James Moggridge is dead now, gone for ever. Well, Minnie--"I can face it
no longer." If she said that--(Let me look at her. She is brushing the
eggshell into deep declivities). She said it certainly, leaning against
the wall of the bedroom, and plucking at the little balls which edge the
claret-coloured curtain. But when the self speaks to the self, who is
speaking?--the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the
central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world--a
coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern
restlessly up and down the dark corridors. "I can bear it no longer,"
her spirit says. "That man at lunch--Hilda--the children." Oh, heavens,
her sob! It's the spirit wailing its destiny, the spirit driven hither,
thither, lodging on the diminishing carpets--meagre footholds--shrunken
shreds of all the vanishing universe--love, life, faith, husband,
children, I know not what splendours and pageantries glimpsed in
girlhood. "Not for me--not for me."

But then--the muffins, the bald elderly dog? Bead mats I should fancy
and the consolation of underlinen. If Minnie Marsh were run over and
taken to hospital, nurses and doctors themselves would exclaim....
There's the vista and the vision--there's the distance--the blue blot at
the end of the avenue, while, after all, the tea is rich, the muffin
hot, and the dog--"Benny, to your basket, sir, and see what mother's
brought you!" So, taking the glove with the worn thumb, defying once
more the encroaching demon of what's called going in