He has a daughter, _Nixie_, who is not old enough to
know how bad all this is, and together they hear the wind singing glees
without words (or in Volapuk, but anyway not intelligible to us poor
normals), a thing Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD has been doing or pretending to
do for years without once taking me in.
_Anthony_ is run over and (as we say) dies. After an extraordinarily
tiresome conversation in the morning-room with his friend and his son
and his mother (who are also what people call dead) it dawns upon him
that something odd has happened to himself also. His wife and two
children, after his (so-called) death, become blissfully happy and set
to work to finish his book, that being, as they think, his wish. Well, I
wonder. At any rate in death (as we say) he was not divided--from his
egotisms.
One knows well enough, alas, how the temptation to spiritual drug-taking
has grown as the result of the accumulated sorrows of these past years,
but it is not well that such a treatment of the eternal question should
be taken seriously. Is this sort of thing really better than the
harp-and-cloud theory? It is not.
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