It was after every one had gone to bed and the lights were out that Elliott lay awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and worried and worried about Father, three thousand miles away. He wasn’t an aviator, 144 it was true, but in France wasn’t the land almost as unsafe as the air? She had imagined so many things that might perfectly easily happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things—about the new kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica’s fingers, but in the end she spoke out the thing that was uppermost in her mind.
“Mother Jess,” she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; “Mother Jess, I don’t like death.”
She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because she felt very strongly and she wasn’t used to talking about such things. But 145 she had to say it. Though if the room hadn’t been dark, I doubt if she could have got it out at all.
“No, dear,” said Aunt Jessica, quietly. “Most of us don’t like death. I wonder if your feeling isn’t due to the fact that you think of it as an end?”
“What is it,” asked Elliott, “but an end?” She was so astonished that her words sounded almost brusque.
“I like to think of it as a coming alive,” said Aunt Jessica, “a coming alive more vigorously than ever. The world is beginning to think of it so, too.”
Elliott lay still after Aunt Jessica had gone out of the room and tried to think about what she had said. It was quite the oddest thing that anybody had said yet. But all she really succeeded in thinking about was the quiet certainty in Aunt Jessica’s voice, the comforting clasp of Aunt Jessica’s arms, and the kiss still warm on her lips.