“Your ethics, my dear Spalding, are where they’ve always been, where you came from, not here. And if I was what they call a bad man, that’s to say a bad terrestrial organism, I was a thundering good poet. You say I slipped in easily; do you suppose it’s easy to be a poet? My dear fellow, it requires an inflexibility, a purity, a discipline of mind—of mind, remember—that you haven’t any conception of. And surely you should be the last person in the world to regard mind as an inferior secondary affair. Anyhow, the consequence is that I’ve not only got into heaven, I’ve got into one of the best heavens, a heaven reserved exclusively for the very finest spirits.”
“Then,” said Mr. Spalding, “if we’re in heaven, who’s in hell?”
“Couldn’t say for certain. But we shouldn’t put it that way. We should say: Who’s gone back to earth?”
“Well—am I likely to meet Uncle Sims, or Aunt Emily, or Tom Rumbold here? You remember them, Elizabeth?”
“Oh, yes, I remember. They’d be almost certain to be sent back. They couldn’t stand eternal things. There’s nothing eternal about meanness and stupidity and nastiness.”
“What’ll happen to them, do you suppose?”
“What should you say, Paul?”
“I should say they’d suffer damnably till they’d got some bigness and intelligence and decency knocked into them.”
“It’ll be a sell for Aunt Emily. She was brought up to believe that stupidity was no drawback to getting into heaven.”
“Lots of people,” said Jeffreson, “will be sold. Like my father, the Dean of Eastminster; he was cocksure he’d get in; but they won’t let him. And why, do you suppose? Because the poor old boy couldn’t see that my poems were beautiful.