Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/397

THE PAPERS life?" He put the question, agreeably, across the table to his guest; agreeably of course in spite of his eye's dry glitter.

His guest's expression, at this, fairly became beautiful. "Well, it's an awfully nice point. Certainly one would like to feel the great murmur surrounding one's name, to be there, more or less, so as not to lose the sense of it, and as I really think, you know, the pleasure; the great city, the great empire, the world itself for the moment, hanging literally on one's personality and giving a start, in its suspense, whenever one is mentioned. Big sensation, you know, that," Mr. Marshal pleadingly smiled, "and of course if one were dead one wouldn't enjoy it. One would have to come to life for that."

"Naturally," Bight rejoined—"only that's what the dead don't do. You can't eat your cake and have it. The question is," he goodnaturedly explained, "whether you'd be willing, for the certitude of the great murmur you speak of, to part with your life under circumstances of extraordinary mystery."

His guest earnestly fixed it. "Whether I would be willing?"

"Mr. Marshall wonders," Maud said to Bight, "if you are, as a person interested in his reputation, definitely proposing to him some such possibility."

He looked at her, on this, with mild, round eyes, and she felt, wonderfully, that he didn't quite see her as joking. He smiled—he always smiled, but his anxiety showed, and he turned it again to their companion. "You mean—a—the knowing how it might be going to be felt?"

"Well, yes—call it that. The consciousness of what one's unexplained extinction—given, to start with, one's high position—would mean, wouldn't be able to help meaning, for millions and millions of people. The point is—and I admit it's, as you call it, a nice one— 385