"I?" said I. "I don't like the atmosphere it produces. There may be ghosts, and spirits, and all that. The dead must be somewhere; there's no such place as nowhere. But they don't affect me particularly. Do they you?"
"Well," he said, "no, not directly. Indirectly I suppose it does."
"I think it makes a horribly depressing atmosphere, spiritualism," said I. "I want to kick."
"Exactly! And ought one?" he asked in his terribly sane-seeming way.
This made me laugh. I knew what he was up to.
"I don't know what you mean by ought," said I. "If I really want to kick, if I know I can't stand a thing, I kick. Who's going to authorise me, if my own genuine feeling doesn't?"
"Quite," he said, staring at me like an owl, with a fixed, meditative stare.
"Do you know," he said, "I suddenly thought at dinner-time, what corpses we all were, sitting eating our dinners. I thought it when I saw you look at those little Jerusalem artichoke things in a white sauce. Suddenly it struck me, you were alive and twinkling, and we were all bodily dead. Bodily dead, if you understand. Quite alive in other directions, but bodily dead. And whether we ate vegetarian or meat made no difference. We were bodily dead."
"Ah, with a slap in the face," said I, "we come to life! You or I or anybody."
"I do understand poor Lucy," said Luke. "Don't you? She forgot to be flesh and blood while she was alive, and now she can't forgive herself, nor the Colonel. That must be pretty rough, you know, not to realise it till you're dead, and you haven't, so to speak, anything left to go on. I mean it's awfully important to be flesh and blood."