He picked a lump of plaster out of his ear and lifted high the lamp.
"But my grief, my grief, when all is said and done, ain't she a dabster!" he whispered with a tinge of admiration. "And warn't it—warn't it nice calculation?"
THE MEEKER RITUAL[14]
By JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
From The Century
I. The Rock Of Ages
The entire pretension is so ridiculous that it is difficult to credit the extent of its acceptance. I don't mean McGeorge's story, but the whole sweep of spiritism. It ought to be unnecessary to point out the puerility of the evidence—the absurd babble advanced as the speech of wise men submerged in the silent consummation of death, the penny tricks with bells and banjos, the circus-like tables and anthropomorphic Edens. Yet, so far as the phrase goes, there is something in it; but whatever that is, lies in demonstrable science, the investigations of the subconscious by Freud and Jung.
McGeorge himself, a reporter with a sufficient education in the actual, tried to repeat impartially, with the vain illusion of an open mind, what he had been told; but it was clear that his power of reasoning had been disarranged. We were sitting in the Italian restaurant near his paper to which he had conducted me, and he was inordinately troubled by flies. A small, dark man, he was never without a cigarette; he had always been nervous, but I had no memory of such uneasiness as he now exhibited.
"It's rather dreadful," he said, gazing at me for an instant, and then shifting his glance about the white plaster walls and small flock of tables, deserted at that hour. "I mean this thing of not really dying—hanging about in the wind, in space. I used to have a natural dread of death; but now I'm afraid of—of keeping on. When you think of it, a grave's quite a pleasant place. It's restful. This other—" He broke off, but not to eat.