That night I determined I would make a great effort to bring Jane into the circle of light, as I love to call it. She would find such comfort there, if only it could be. But I knew it would be difficult; Jane is so hard-headed, and, for all her cleverness in writing, has so little imagination really. She said that _Raymond_ made her sick. And she wouldn't look at _Rupert Lives_! or _Across the Stream_, E.F. Benson's latest novel about the other side. She quite frankly doesn't believe there is another side. I remember her saying to me once, in her school-girl slang, when she was seventeen or so, 'Well, I'd like to think I went on, mother; I think it's simply rotten pipping out. I _like_ being alive, and I'd like to have tons more of it--but there it is, I can't believe anything so weird and it's no use trying. And if I don't pip out after all, it'll be such a jolly old surprise and lark that I shall be glad I couldn't believe in it here.' Johnny, I remember, said to her (those two were always ragging each other), 'Ah, you may be wishing you only _could_ pip out, then....' But I told him that I wished he wouldn't, even in joke, allude to that bogey of the nurseries of my generation, a place of punishment. That terrible old teaching! Thank God we are outgrowing much of it. I must say that the descriptions They give, when They give any, of Their place of being, do not sound very cheerful--but it cannot at all resemble the old-fashioned place of torment, it sounds so much less clear-cut and definite than that, more like London in a yellow fog. 5 I do not think I slept that night. I am bad at sleeping when I have had a shock. My idiotic nerves again. Crane, in his book, _Right and Wrong Thinking_, says one should drop discordant thoughts out of one's mind as one drops a pebble out of one's hand. But my interior calm is not yet sufficient for this exercise, and I confess I am all too easily shaken to pieces by trouble, especially the troubles of those I love. I felt a wreck when I met Percy at an early breakfast next morning. He, too, looked jaded and strained, and ate hardly any breakfast, only a little force and three cups of strong tea--an inadequate meal, as I told him, upon which to face so trying a day. For we had to have strength not only for ourselves but for our children. Giving out: it is so much harder work than taking in, and it is the work for us older people always.