"He was a young man—in his twenty-ninth year," I replied automatically, "dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St Peter's—Beechwood, you know." I was speaking in a low voice, as if I might be overheard.
It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr Crimble had faded into a vanishing shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory—a black, sad memory.
But Susan's voice interrupted these faint musings. "A clergyman!" she was repeating. "But why—why did he—do that?"
"They said, melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible—or seemed impossible—for him to go on living."
"But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have said it like that?"
"But surely," argued I, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying about for a path of evasion, "it's better to call things by their proper names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean one has any right to—to not die in one's own bed."
"And do you really think like that?—the body of no importance? You? Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her 'pocket Venus,' and she means it, too, in her own sly way."
"It's very kind of her," said I, breathing more freely. "Some one I know always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don't mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn't matter what we are called. Why, if that were so, there wouldn't be any Society at all, would there? We should all be—well—anonymous." Deep inside I felt myself smile. "Not that that makes much difference to good poetry."
Susan sighed. "How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr Crimble?—that was his name, wasn't it?"
"Well, it hasn't very much," I confessed. "He hadn't the time for it."