The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to
pull at pretty strongly before it revived. “I should not be surprised,”
he began, “if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and
perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of
dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and
threatening. That conception wouldn’t have been found in men’s minds at
first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the
fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and
the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments
as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our
own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse
of incalculable time.”
“You said just now,” said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, “that
personification had gone out.”
“Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion
of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive
in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory
suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.”
“I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge.
“You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.
“Perfectly,” I said. “I--he isn’t living, is he?”
“No; he died two years ago.”
“I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put
a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.
“You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe,” the psychologist pursued.