At the corner where he waited for the Brookline car some workmen were repairing the track. Under baggy blue shirts the muscles of arms and shoulders moved tautly. A smell of sweat and rank pipes came from them. Wenny would have wanted to be one of them, redfaced spitting men with skillful ugly hands. The men who had dug the grave had been like that, men digging everywhere were like that; strange how through all the tense idiocy of the funeral, and Wenny's father and mother very solemn and professional, and the father's little speech to the effect that he believed as he believed in God Almighty that his son had not died a suicide but had been done to death by some low companion or other, he had felt that the only people there Wenny would have liked were the two hickory-faced men with spades who filled in the grave, their thick backs bending and straightening as they shoveled in the reddish dirt. Fanshaw suddenly pressed his lips hard together as he remembered the undertaker's man in black broadcloth unscrewing the silver handles from the coffin before it was lowered into the grave, and Wenny's father in black broadcloth eloquently reading the burial service, and the rattle of the first shovelfull of dirt and stones on the coffin. The car stopped in front of him with a shriek of brakes. Fanshaw sat stiffly in the rattling streetcar that smelt of cheap perfume and overcoats and breathed out air, staring unseeing out of the window. "O, Muriel, isn't that suicide case dreadful?" A girl's voice from the seat ahead roused him. Two blonde girls in tamoshanters were bending over a newspaper. "That boy never killed himself, I'm certain," said the other girl. "Do you think he was murdered?" "Yes, deary, I do, by the husband of the woman he had wronged ..." "But, Muriel, he didn't wrong anybody ... He killed himself for grief because a Back Bay beauty spurned his love." "Lot o' piffle, that stuff ... I wouldn't kill myself for any man." "O, but Muriel, you might. Think, if he was a duke or something in disguise and dreadfully handsome, with curly hair and a strong, silent face." "Like fun I would. Have a peppermint." "O, but Muriel, don't you think it would be just wonderful to have something like that happen ... a suicide or something? Of course it'ld be just terrible, but ..." A smell of chewed peppermints filtered gradually back to Fanshaw. The streetcar had speeded up noisily, so that he could no longer hear what they were saying. * * * * "I wonder, Nan, if death doesn't make one feel how very acutely one is alive, the thought of one's own death, or the death of someone beloved," Fanshaw said, turning suddenly to Nan, seeking out her eyes. It had been on his tongue all day, but somehow he had not been able to say it till now. He was tingling hot with the excitement of saying it. "Or do you mean that we feel in ourselves the dead person alive?" Nan's eyes flashed green in his. "No, no, Wenny wouldn't have meant that."