He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one?
I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's safe—in his lifetime, anyway."
Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his lifetime? It's the life beyond life—the life beyond life."
It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking about it then.
He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead they'll let him speak."
"Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em."
"He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to me that evening.
He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to mean—for him.
IV
He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That pilgrimage was my last—it'll be two years ago this autumn—and it was in the spring of last year he died.