“You are not dying, only drugged. And you are jealous again all the time. Jealous of Gabriel Stanton, who despised your work and could not recall your personality, however often he met you. Jealous of the literary critics who ignored you and praised me. And jealous of Peter, Peter Kennedy, who from the first would have laid down his great awkward body for me to tread upon.” * * * * * I half woke up, raised myself on my arm, and drank a little water, looked over to where Margaret sat, but she was no longer there. I did not want to go to sleep again, and lay on my back thinking of what had been told me. “Jealous!” Why should I be jealous of Margaret Capel’s dead fame, of her dying memory? But perhaps it was true. I had a large public, made a large income, but had no recognition, no real reputation, was never in the “Literary Review of the Year,” was not jeered at as other popular writers, but only ignored. Well, I did not overrate my work. I never succeeded in pleasing myself. I began every book with unextinguishable hope, and every one fell short of my expectations. People wrote to me and told me I had made them laugh or cry, helped them through convalescence, cheered their toilsome day. “I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’” To repletion I had had such letters, requests for autographs, praise, and always: “I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’” Fifty-eight thousand copies had been sold in the six-shilling edition. I wonder what were the figures of Margaret Capel’s biggest seller. Under four thousand I knew. Little Billie Black told me, cherubic Billie, the publisher, with his girlish complexion and his bald head, who knew everybody and everything and told us even more. I was getting drowsy again, figures, confused and confusing, passing over the surface of my mind. Billie Black and Sir George Stanton, Gabriel, then Ella, a dim glance of my long-lost husband, Dennis, a smiling flash in the foreground; my eyes were hot with tears because of this short glad sight of him. Then Peter Kennedy again; awkward in his tweed cutaway morning coat. What did she mean by saying I was jealous of Peter Kennedy? I smiled in my deepening somnolence. Then there was an organ and children dancing, a monkey, a policeman, and the end of a string of absurdities in a long narrow vista. Sleep and unconsciousness at the end.