women do," I said. I asked him how many funerals of women--wives
and mothers--he had been to in the course of his life where he could sit
down and really think that they had died to the point--the way they do
in novels. I didn't see why people should be required by critics and
other authorities, to die to the point in a book more than anywhere
else. It is this shallow, reckless way that readers have of wanting to
have everything pleasant and appropriate when people die in novels which
makes writing a novel nowadays as much as a man's reputation is worth.

The P. G. S. of M. explained that it wasn't exactly the way she died but
it was the way everything was left--left to the imagination.

I said I was sorry for any human being who had lived in a world like
this who didn't leave a good deal to the imagination when he died. The
dullest, most uninteresting man that any one can ever know becomes
interesting in his death. One walks softly down the years of his life,
peering through them. One cannot help loving him a little--stealthily.
One goes out a little way with him on his long journey--feels bound in
with him at last--actually bound in with him (it is like a promise) for
ever. The more one knows about people's lives in this world, the more
indefinitely, the more irrelevantly,--sometimes almost comically, or as
a kind of an aside, or a bit of repartee,--they end them. Suddenly,
sometimes while we laugh or look, they turn upon us, fling their souls
upon the invisible, and are gone. It is like a last wistful haunting
pleasantry--death is--from some of us, a kind of bravado in it--as one
would say, "Oh, well, dying is really after all--having been allowed one
look at a world like this--a small matter."

It is true that most people in most novels, never having been born, do
not really need to die--that is, if they are logical,--and they might as
well die to the point or as the reader likes as in any other way, but if
there is one sign rather than another that a novel belongs to the first
class, it is that the novelist claims all the privileges of the stage of
the world in it. He refuses to write a little parlour of a book and he
sees that his people die the way they live, leaving as much left over to
the imagination as they know how.

That there are many reasons for the habit of reading for results, as it
is called, goes without saying. It also goes without saying--that is, no
one is saying very much about it--that the hab