Old women sitting in corners, suddenly making irrelevant remarks and chuckling, see; they make a stillness of reality, a mind picture that does not care, out of the rush of life. Perhaps they do not fear death. Perhaps people who don’t take part don’t fear death … the outsider sees most of the game; but that means a cynical man who does not care for anything; body and mind without soul. Lying dead at last, with reality left unnoticed on his dressing-table, along the window sill, along the edge of things outside the window. …
But one day in the future time would move, by itself, not through anything one did, and there would be no more life. … She looked up hurriedly towards the changing voice. He was no longer reading with a face that showed his thoughts wandering far away.
“The thought of death is, throughout life, entirely absent from the mind of the healthy man.” His brilliant thought filled eyes shone towards her at the end of the sentence.
“There is indeed a vulgarity in perfect health,” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she said hurriedly, carrying off the statement for examination, as peacefully he went on reading. What did vulgarity mean, or perfect health? Nobody knew. Dante ennobled the vulgar tongue. … People went on forever writing books using the same words with different meanings. Her eyes returned to the relaxed unconscious form. He thought too much of books. Yet it did not appal him to think of giving up his free intellectual life and taking to work. “I shall still be an interested amateur.” … He would go on reading, all his life, sitting as he was sitting now, grave and beautiful; with a mind outspread in a mental experience so wide that he was indifferent to the usual ideas of freedom and advantage. Yet he did not seem to be aware how much the sitting like this, linked to the world by its deep echo in the book, was a realisation of life as he saw it. It did not occur to him that this serenity, in which were