"No, no!" murmured a voice behind the door. "How shall any of us justify the desperate clinging to life for the mere sake of living?" She asked the question as if she were addressing a drawing-room full of prosperous people who had the merest speculative interest in the inquiry. "How many instances do we see of men and women who have outlived not only their usefulness, but their satisfactions? And yet they drag along their gray existence, a dreary penance to themselves, and a menace to those who still can hope. There are those who cling to the pleasant fiction that every one is of some good use in the world. If that is so, it is equally true that every one does _some_ ill, stands in somebody's light, and bars his way to progress. But it is not with the real or imaginary 'helpers' we have to deal, but with those who through misfortune have lost their grip on circumstance, and whose whole remaining energy is absorbed in an animal-like clinging to existence. Many of the world's sick and wounded are capable of feeling the attraction of the idea of suicide, and are held back from freedom by two superstitions. One was made current by the people who lacked the courage to 'go and do likewise,' and who, therefore, have branded all suicides 'lunatics' or 'cowards.' The other superstition was given the world by the priests, who would have been less zealous and less astute than history shows them if they'd not barred this escape with mighty threats and penalties." "Bah!" "Priests!" "Oh yes!" A little undercurrent from the crowd crept through her words. "Many a gentle soul in the past," she went on, "has endured years of needless agony rather than buy release at the price of public execration--being denied decent burial, and flung into a ditch at the cross-ways with a stake driven through the body. We don't treat these refugees quite that way now, but in being less violent we are not less cruel. When we hear of a suicide, the first insult we offer him is to ask, 'Were his accounts right?' Next, 'Was he a victim to bad habits?'" "Exactly!" cried the voice, in broken English. "What Babin said of Jean--" "Sh! sh!"