"You are asking too much.... I should say about a year." The doctor passed up the leafy avenue. I remained looking at the silly sheep, seeing in all the green landscape only a dark, narrow space. That day I saw her for the last time. She was sitting on a low chair, very ill indeed, and the voice, weak, but still young and pure, said: "Is that you, Kant? Come round here and let me look at you." Amid my work in London, I used to receive letters from my friends, letters telling me of the march of the disease, and with each letter death grew more and more realisable until her death seemed to stand in person before me. It could not be much longer delayed, and the letter came which told me that "Mother was not expected to live through the winter." Soon after came another letter: "Mother will not live another month"; and this was followed by a telegram: "Mother is dying; come at once." It was a bleak and gusty afternoon in the depth of winter, and the Sunday train stopped at every station, and the journey dragged its jogging length of four hours out to the weary end. The little station shivered by an icy sea, and going up the lane the wind rattled and beat my face like an iron. I hurried, looking through the trees for the lights that would shine across the park if she were not dead, and welcome indeed to my eyes were the gleaming yellow squares. Slipping in the back way, and meeting the butler in the passage, I said: "How is she?" "Very bad indeed, sir." She did not die that night, nor the next, nor yet the next; and as we waited for death, slow but sure of foot, to come and take what remained of her from us, I thought often of the degradation that these lingering deaths impose upon the watchers, and how they force into disgraceful prominence all that is animal in us. For, however great our grief may be, we must eat and drink, and must even talk of other things than the beloved one whom we are about to lose; for we may not escape from our shameful nature. And, eating and drinking, we commented on the news that came hourly from the sickroom: "Mother will not live the week." A few days after, "Mother will hardly get over Sunday"; and the following week, "Mother will not pass the night." Lunch was the meal that shocked me most, and I often thought, "She is dying upstairs while we are eating jam tarts."