"But my grief, my grief, when all is said and done, ain't she a dabster!" he whispered with a tinge of admiration. "And warn't it--warn't it nice calculation?" THE MEEKER RITUAL[14] [Note 14: Copyright, 1919, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1920, by Joseph Hergesheimer.] BY JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER From _The Century_ I. THE ROCK OF AGES The entire pretension is so ridiculous that it is difficult to credit the extent of its acceptance. I don't mean McGeorge's story, but the whole sweep of spiritism. It ought to be unnecessary to point out the puerility of the evidence--the absurd babble advanced as the speech of wise men submerged in the silent consummation of death, the penny tricks with bells and banjos, the circus-like tables and anthropomorphic Edens. Yet, so far as the phrase goes, there is something in it; but whatever that is, lies in demonstrable science, the investigations of the subconscious by Freud and Jung. McGeorge himself, a reporter with a sufficient education in the actual, tried to repeat impartially, with the vain illusion of an open mind, what he had been told; but it was clear that his power of reasoning had been disarranged. We were sitting in the Italian restaurant near his paper to which he had conducted me, and he was inordinately troubled by flies. A small, dark man, he was never without a cigarette; he had always been nervous, but I had no memory of such uneasiness as he now exhibited. "It's rather dreadful," he said, gazing at me for an instant, and then shifting his glance about the white plaster walls and small flock of tables, deserted at that hour. "I mean this thing of not really dying--hanging about in the wind, in space. I used to have a natural dread of death; but now I'm afraid of--of keeping on. When you think of it, a grave's quite a pleasant place. It's restful. This other--" He broke off, but not to eat. "My editor," he began anew, apparently at a tangent, "wouldn't consider it. I was glad. I'd like to forget it, go back. There might be a story for you." Whatever he had heard in connection with the Meeker circle, I assured him, would offer me nothing; I didn't write that sort of thing. "You'd appreciate Lizzie Tuoey," he asserted. McGeorge had been sent to the Meeker house to unearth what he could about the death of Mrs. Kraemer. He described vividly the location, which provided the sole interest to an end admitted normal in its main features. It was, he said, one of those vitrified wildernesses of brick that have given the city the name of a place of homes; dreadful. Amazing in extent, it was without a single feature to vary the monotony of two-storied dwellings cut into exact parallelograms by paved streets; there was a perspective of continuous facades and unbroken tin roofs in every direction, with a grocery or drug-store and an occasional saloon at the corners, and beyond the sullen red steeple of a church.