"My dear friend, you're talking so much that you don't see those who are passing us. That girl, she who has just turned to look back, favours heliotrope; it is delicious still upon the air; she is as pretty a girl as any that ever came in a sedan-chair to see a comedy by Wycherley. The comedy varies very little: it is always the same comedy, and it is always interesting. The circus in a sultry summer night under a full moon is very like Klinsor's garden. Come, if you be not _Parsifal_."
I was in London when my brother wrote telling me that mother was ill. She was not in any immediate danger, he said, but if a change for the worse were to take place, and it were necessary for me to come over, he would send a telegram. A few hours after a telegram was handed to me. It contained four words: "_Come at once.--Maurice._" "So mother is dying," I muttered to myself, and I stood at gaze, foreseeing myself taken into her room by a nurse and given a chair by the bedside, foreseeing a hand lying outside the bed which I should have to hold until I heard the death-rattle and saw her face become quiet for ever.
This was my first vision, but in the midst of my packing, I remembered that mother might linger for days. The dear friend who lies in the church-yard under the downs lingered for weeks; every day her husband and her children saw her dying under their eyes: why should not this misfortune be mine? I know not to what God, but I prayed all night in the train, and on board the boat; I got into the train at the Broadstone praying. It is impossible, at least for me, to find words to express adequately the agony of mind I endured on that journey. Words can only hint at it, but I think that any one possessed of any experience of life, or who has any gift of imagination, will be able to guess at the terror that haunted me--terror of what?--not so much that my mother might die, nor hope that she might live, but just that I might arrive in time to see her die. In this confession I am afraid I shall seem hard and selfish to some; that will be because many people lack imagination, or the leisure to try to understand that there are not only many degrees of sensibility, but many kinds, and it is doubtful if any reader can say with truth any more than that my sensibility is not his or hers. It is my privilege to be sympathetic with ideas I do not share, and in certain moods I approach those who take a sad pleasure in last words, good-byes, and at looking on the dead. In my present mood it seems to me that it is not unlikely that my mother's last good-bye and her death appeared to me more awful in imagination than it would have ever done in reality. Indeed, there can be hardly any doubt that this is so, for we are only half-conscious of what is happening. Reality clouds, our actions mitigate, our perception; we can see clearly only when we look back or forwards. There is something very merciful about reality; if there were not, we should not be able to live at all.