We are not long for music and laughter, Love and desire and hate; I think we have no portion in them after We pass the gate. “Why should I be turned out of the game?” he asked himself, rebelling. He frowned, and answered: “Oh, Lord!—the old argument!” But the thought of his own expunging from the picture was very bitter. “Like the puff from the steamer’s funnel, I should be gone.” He looked at himself, at his limbs and his body in the pride of his maturity. He was very beautiful to himself. “Nothing, in the place where I am,” he said. “Gone, like a puff of steam that melts on the sunshine.” Again Siegmund looked at the sea. It was glittering with laughter as at a joke. “And I,” he said, lying down in the warm sand, “I am nothing. I do not count; I am inconsiderable.” He set his teeth with pain. There were no tears, there was no relief. A convulsive gasping shook him as he lay on the sands. All the while he was arguing with himself. “Well,” he said, “if I am nothing dead I am nothing alive.” But the vulgar proverb arose—“Better a live dog than a dead lion,” to answer him. It seemed an ignominy to be dead. It meant, to be overlooked, even by the smallest creature of God’s earth. Surely that was a great ignominy. Helena, meanwhile, was bathing, for the last time, by the same sea-shore with him. She was no swimmer. Her endless delight was to explore, to discover small treasures. For her the world was still a great wonder-box which hid innumerable sweet toys for surprises in all its crevices. She had bathed in many rock-pools’ tepid baths, trying first one, then another. She had lain on the sand where the cold arms of the ocean lifted her and smothered her impetuously, like an awful lover. “The sea is a great deal like Siegmund,” she said, as she rose panting, trying to dash her nostrils free from water. It was true; the sea as it flung over her filled her with the same uncontrollable terror as did Siegmund when he sometimes grew silent and strange in a tide of passion.