erial side of the "Life and Letters," its absolute importance to
their poor finances, the fact that if _he_ could afford to wait,
_they_ couldn't. I don't think that view of it ever entered into her
head. The great thing, she said, was that it should be done.

And then he had to tell her that _he_ couldn't do it. He couldn't do
it at all. "That part of it, Simpson," he said, "was horrible. I
felt as if I were butchering her--butchering a lamb."

But I gathered that he had been pretty firm so far, until she broke
down and cried. For she did, poor bleeding lamb, all in a minute.
She abandoned her superb attitude and her high ground and put it
altogether on another footing. Her father hadn't been the happy,
satisfied, facilely successful person he was supposed to be. People
had been cruel to him; they had never understood; they didn't
realize that his work didn't represent him. Of course she knew (she
seems to have handled this part of it with a bold sincerity) what
he, Burton, thought about it; but he did realize _that_. He knew it
didn't do him anything like justice. He knew what lay behind it,
behind everything that he had written. It was wonderful, Burton
said, how she did that, how she made the vague phrase open up a vast
hinterland of intention, the unexplored and unexploited spirit of
him. He knew, Burton knew, how he had felt about it, how he had felt
about his fame. It hadn't been the thing he really wanted. He had
never had that. And oh, she wanted him to have it. It was the only
thing she wanted, the only thing she really cared about, the only
thing she had ever asked of Burton.

He told me frankly that she didn't seem quite sane about it. He
understood it, of course. She was broken up by the long strain of
her devotion, by his death and by the crash afterward, by the
unbearable pathos of him, of his futility, and of the menacing
oblivion. You could see that Antigone had parted with her sense of
values and distinctions, that she had lost her bearings; she was a
creature that drifted blindly on a boundless sea of compassion. She
saw her father die the ultimate death. She pleaded passionately with
Burton to hold back the shadow; to light a lamp for him; to prolong,
if it were only for a little while, his memory; to give him, out of
his own young radiance and vitality, the life beyond life that he
had desired.

Even then, so he says, he had held out, but more feebly. He said he
thought somebody else ought to d