“If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said—“and you needn’t frown, because one of us must be first—you’ll put that in the paper.”
She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the dripping trees.
“Rubbish!” Pray said briefly.
“Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper is to avow one’s self commonplace—to brand one’s self commonplace through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.”
She laughed and added wistfully:
“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die! I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life, how could I be expected to lie still? Ah! I wish you were not so uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.”
“Other people being—the majority, that is——”
“Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions. There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool. You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it in the paper—Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
“Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply—the sharpness with which husbands of some years’ standing veil concern—“and don’t talk nonsense. You’ll take cold.”
“Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown? That sounds like a patent-medicine query—inverted,” she said idly.