“Oh, that is very curious,” said the psychologist. “We talk of generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren’t we always striving from one concrete to another, and isn’t what we call generalizing merely a process of finding our way?” “I see what you mean,” said the artist, expressing in that familiar formula the state of the man who hopes to know what the other man means. “That’s what I say,” Rulledge put in. “You’ve got something up your sleeve. What is it?” Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before him, but, without waiting for a response, he intercepted a waiter who was passing with a coffee-pot, and asked, “Oh, couldn’t you give me some of that?” The man filled his cup for him, and after Wanhope put in the sugar and lifted it to his lips, Rulledge said, with his impetuous business air, “It’s easy to see what Wanhope does his high thinking on.” “Yes,” the psychologist admitted, “coffee is an inspiration. But you can overdo an inspiration. It would be interesting to know whether there hasn’t been a change in the quality of thought since the use of such stimulants came in--whether it hasn’t been subtilized--” “Was that what you were going to say?” demanded Rulledge, relentlessly. “Come, we’ve got no time to throw away!” Everybody laughed. “_You_ haven’t, anyway,” said I. “Well, none of his own,” Minver admitted for the idler. “I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. Well, I don’t want to throw away other peoples’. Go on, Wanhope.” II. The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to pull at pretty strongly before it revived. “I should not be surprised,” he began, “if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and threatening. That conception wouldn’t have been found in men’s minds at first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse of incalculable time.” “You said just now,” said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, “that personification had gone out.” “Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.” “I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge. “You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me. “Perfectly,” I said. “I--he isn’t living, is he?” “No; he died two years ago.” “I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.