you." He then began to talk of other matters with the utmost
calmness. The sequel is a strange one; what he said to his wife I do
not know, but for the few days that I spent with them there was a very
different feeling in the air; he had contrived to reassure her, and her
anxiety seemed for a time, at all events, to be at an end. A few days
after I left them, the child fell ill, and died within a week. The
shock was too much for the wife, and within a month she followed the
child to the grave. My friend was left alone; and it seemed to me like
a ghastly fulfilment of his desires. I was with him at the funeral of
his wife; is it terrible to relate that there was a certain
tranquillity about him that suggested the weariness of one off whom a
strain had been lifted? But his own life was to be a short one; about
two years after he himself died very suddenly, as he had always desired
to die. I saw him often in the interval; he never recurred to the
subject, and I never liked to reopen it. Only once did he speak to me
of her. "I feel," he said to me on one occasion, quite suddenly, "that
the two are waiting for me somewhere, and that they understand; and my
hope is that when I am freed from this vile body I shall be
different--perhaps worthy of their love; it is all within me somewhere,
though I cannot get at it. Don't think of me," he said, turning to me,
"as a very brutal person. I have tried my best; but I think that the
capacity for real feeling has been denied me."

It is a very puzzling episode; what I feel is that though we always
recognise the limitations of people physically and mentally, we do not
sufficiently recognise the moral and emotional limitations. We think of
the will as a dominant factor in people's lives, as a thing that we can
all make use of if we choose; we forget that it is just as strictly
limited and conditioned as all our other faculties.

XXXIX

I have an acquaintance at Cambridge, John Meyrick by name, who visits
me here at intervals, and is to me an object of curious interest. He is
a Fellow and Lecturer of his College. He came up there on a scholarship
from a small school. He worked hard; he was a moderate oar; he did not
make many friends, but he was greatly respected for a sort of quiet
directness and common-sense. He never put himself forward, but when it
fell to him to do anything he did it with confidence and discretion. He
had an excellent head for business, and was Secretary o