"Some time in the pleistocene age, journalists formed the habit of ending their news despatches with the mystic symbol, 30. It signifies—the end.
"I write to tell you that it looks as if it was time to write 30 to the tedious narrative of yours truly. In a word—I'm not the man I was. Which is a cryptic way of saying that I'm more ghost than flesh now, and shifting rapidly. The medico, who is a poor liar, also has a loud voice and doesn't know how thin boarding-house walls are. I heard him tell the landlady that money for medicine was a case of economic folly. I was a gone goose—or words to that effect.
"It's been a long road and mostly a hard one. I'm not sorry to reach the end. You see, I never really learned how to walk. Now and then I thought I had. But the thought was always followed by a tumble. The last was the hardest. I don't want to try any more. And when a man gets too tired to try—well, there's nothing left but crêpe, is there?
"Really, the doctor's information is quite the cheerfullest thing I could hear. All I ask is that they ring down the curtain on the delectable comedy of 'Brent Good, Misfit,' as expeditiously as possible. From what he said, I judge they will.
"I've tried more things in my allotted span than ten men ordinarily try. And I've failed, with perfect uniformity, in every one. I counted much on The Dispatch. I stubbed my spiritual toe there, too...."
At that point Judith had to pause, because a mist formed over her eyes and would not let her see. And the next words brought a lump into her throat, which choked and hurt.
"... I hoped much—no, hope is hardly the word for what I wanted—from you. And of course—as I never for an instant doubted I would—I failed there. Now there's nothing left. I wonder what the next instalment of the yarn will bring. Do the gods, think you, punish failure as men do?
"But I wander. (My speculations to the landlady regarding reincarnation have resulted in her frantic appeal to the doctor, with a bottle of something, in consequence, by my side. That's the scientific way of solving the problem of immortality.) However, I'm not writing you now to oblige you to join with me in conjecturing as to what lies in the Other Room. It's this one, and your place in it that troubles me now.