"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.
"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do. First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"
"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."
"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.
"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."
"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves, walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."
"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"
"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death. I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did. I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I would deliberately court destruction—or appear to. The outcome was that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you admired me for."
"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd become a brave man."
"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever was."