ad lived.... But,
in a way, I am thankful to have him on the other side, reaching his baby
hands across to me in the way he so often does.

That night I determined I would make a great effort to bring Jane into
the circle of light, as I love to call it. She would find such comfort
there, if only it could be. But I knew it would be difficult; Jane is so
hard-headed, and, for all her cleverness in writing, has so little
imagination really. She said that _Raymond_ made her sick. And she
wouldn't look at _Rupert Lives_! or _Across the Stream_, E.F. Benson's
latest novel about the other side. She quite frankly doesn't believe
there is another side. I remember her saying to me once, in her
school-girl slang, when she was seventeen or so, 'Well, I'd like to think
I went on, mother; I think it's simply rotten pipping out. I _like_ being
alive, and I'd like to have tons more of it--but there it is, I can't
believe anything so weird and it's no use trying. And if I don't pip out
after all, it'll be such a jolly old surprise and lark that I shall be
glad I couldn't believe in it here.' Johnny, I remember, said to her
(those two were always ragging each other), 'Ah, you may be wishing you
only _could_ pip out, then....' But I told him that I wished he wouldn't,
even in joke, allude to that bogey of the nurseries of my generation, a
place of punishment. That terrible old teaching! Thank God we are
outgrowing much of it. I must say that the descriptions They give, when
They give any, of Their place of being, do not sound very cheerful--but
it cannot at all resemble the old-fashioned place of torment, it sounds
so much less clear-cut and definite than that, more like London in a
yellow fog.

5

I do not think I slept that night. I am bad at sleeping when I have had a
shock. My idiotic nerves again. Crane, in his book, _Right and Wrong
Thinking_, says one should drop discordant thoughts out of one's mind as
one drops a pebble out of one's hand. But my interior calm is not yet
sufficient for this exercise, and I confess I am all too easily shaken to
pieces by trouble, especially the troubles of those I love.

I felt a wreck when I met Percy at an early breakfast next morning. He,
too, looked jaded and strained, and ate hardly any breakfast, only a
little force and three cups of strong tea--an inadequate meal, as I told
him, upon which to face so trying a day. For we had to have strength not
only for ourselves but for our children.