Miggy stood regarding me intently.
"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the door," she observed; "I thought it was you."
I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one nature is never mistaken for the other.
"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.
"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning to get the feeling."
"I beg your pardon. To get—what?" I asked.
"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better—like it was something alive inside you. That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm real glad I'm living."
As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.
"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is still a hill.)
"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."