Yet now the first rush of executorial emotion is over I can begin to doubt about Boon's intention in making me his "literary executor." Did he, after all, intend these pencilled scraps, these marginal caricatures, and--what seems to me most objectionable--annotated letters from harmless prominent people for publication? Or was his selection of me his last effort to prolong what was, I think, if one of the slightest, one also of the most sustained interests of his life, and that was a prolonged faint jeering at my expense? Because always--it was never hidden from me--in his most earnest moments Boon jeered at me. I do not know why he jeered at me, it was always rather pointless jeering and far below his usual level, but jeer he did. Even while we talked most earnestly and brewed our most intoxicating draughts of project and conviction, there was always this scarce perceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule floating like a drowning sprig of blue borage in the cup. His was indeed essentially one of those suspended minds that float above the will and action; when at last reality could be evaded no longer it killed him; he never really believed nor felt the urgent need that goads my more accurate nature to believe and do. Always when I think of us together, I feel that I am on my legs and that he sits about. And yet he could tell me things I sought to know, prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs to a conviction in me that I alone could never attain. He took life as it came, let his fancy play upon it, selected, elucidated, ignored, threw the result in jest or observation or elaborate mystification at us, and would have no more of it.... He would be earnest for a time and then break away. "The Last Trump" is quite typical of the way in which he would turn upon himself. It sets out so straight for magnificence; it breaks off so abominably. You will read it. Yet he took things more seriously than he seemed to do. This war, I repeat, killed him. He could not escape it. It bore him down. He did his best to disregard it. But its worst stresses caught him in the climax of a struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought on by a freak of bathing by moonlight--in an English October, a thing he did to distract his mind from the tension after the Marne--and it destroyed him. The last news they told him was that the Germans had made their "shoot and scuttle" raid upon Whitby and Scarborough. There was much circumstantial description in the morning's paper. They had smashed up a number of houses and killed some hundreds of people, chiefly women and children. Ten little children had been killed or mutilated in a bunch on their way to school, two old ladies at a boarding-house had had their legs smashed, and so on. "Take this newspaper," he said, and held it out to his nurse. "Take it," he repeated irritably, and shook it at her. He stared at it as it receded. Then he seemed to be staring at distant things.