And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not care a straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flying opportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; but what afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It is true there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul that has transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to use the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death at the exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has a strange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to die seems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Now just think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, had lived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man in literature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as he declared himself ready to have done had he been aware of the unfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done it with every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he had caused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been no philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguish of love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Ages equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, a faded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps with sharpness, a mediæval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristan grown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we not have lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that they themselves would have lost a great deal; for I don't see that contentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life--and beat as thin as you will it never does cover quite across the years--is to be compared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest, keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on your side, but I'm not really, because you, you know, think of love as a perpetual _crescendo,_ and I, though I do hear the _crescendo_ and follow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of its splendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable _diminuendo_ to the dead level--and then? Why, the rest is not even silence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused complaining, not very loud, not very definite, but always there till the last chord is reached a long time afterwards--that satisfactory common chord of death. My point is, that if you want to let yourself go to great emotions you ought to have the luck to die at an interesting moment. The alternative makes such a dreary picture; and it is the picture I always see when I hear of love at defiance with the law. The