s.
So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped
one another's ears with wool.

CHAPTER XII

Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of his
mother's strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when she
had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as
the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions
now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an
invalid.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his
mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of
it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn
at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood
for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells
a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her
friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some
leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox
had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She
had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her
friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but
not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to
die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet
with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he
must leave.

The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly not been said in
Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any
more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy
devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would
register the quick motions of man. In Margaret's eyes Mrs. Wilcox had
escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and
no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered
with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so
utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered
before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved superstition." It was
not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in
which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped
her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hithe