"Yes."
"Why, he's a clergyman, isn't he? What does he want to come and talk to me about?"
"Ah! my dear child ..." said Mrs. Bagot, her eyes filling.
Trilby was thoughtful for a while, and then said: "I'm going to die, I suppose. Oh yes! oh yes! There's no mistake about that!"
"Dear Trilby, we are all in the hands of an Almighty Merciful God!" And the tears rolled down Mrs. Bagot's cheeks.
After a long pause, during which she gazed out of the window, Trilby said, in an abstracted kind of way, as though she were talking to herself: "Après tout, c'est pas déjà si raide, de claquer! J'en ai tant vus, qui ont passé par la! Au bout du fossé la culbute, ma foi!"
"What are you saying to yourself in French, Trilby? Your French is so difficult to understand!"
"Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking it's not so difficult to die, after all! I've seen such lots of people do it. I've nursed them, you know—papa and mamma and Jeannot, and Angèle Boisse's mother-in-law, and a poor casseur de pierres, Colin Maigret, who lived in the Impasse des Taupes St. Germain. He'd been run over by an omnibus in the Rue Vaugirard, and had to have both his legs cut off just above the knee. They none of them seemed to mind dying a bit. They weren't a bit afraid! I'm not!
"Poor people don't think much of death. Rich people shouldn't either. They should be taught when they're quite young to laugh at it and despise it, like the Chinese. The Chinese die of laughing just as their heads are being cut off, and cheat the executioner! It's all in the day's work, and we're all in the same boat—so who's afraid!"
"Dying is not all, my poor child! Are you prepared to meet your Maker face to face? Have you ever thought about God, and the possible wrath to come if you should die unrepentant?"