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“Yes,” the psychologist admitted, “coffee is an inspiration. But you can overdo an inspiration. It would be interesting to know whether there hasn’t been a change in the quality of thought since the use of such stimulants came in–whether it hasn’t been subtilized–“

“Was that what you were going to say?” demanded Rulledge, relentlessly. “Come, we’ve got no time to throw away!”

Everybody laughed.

“You haven’t, anyway,” said I.

“Well, none of his own,” Minver admitted for the idler.

“I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. Well, I don’t want to throw away other peoples’. Go on, Wanhope.”

II.

The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to pull at pretty strongly before it revived. “I should not be surprised,” he began, “if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and threatening. That conception wouldn’t have been found in men’s minds at first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse of incalculable time.”

“You said just now,” said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, “that personification had gone out.”

“Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.”

“I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge.

“You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.

“Perfectly,” I said. “I–he isn’t living, is he?”

“No; he died two years ago.”

“I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.

“You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe,” the psychologist pursued.

I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds’ house.

“Then you know what a type she was, I suppose,” he turned to the others, “and as they’re both dead it’s no contravention of the club etiquette against talking of women, to speak of her. I can’t very well give the instance–the sign–that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of circumlocution.” We all urged him to go on, and he went on. “I had the facts I’m going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?”

He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: “No; I must confess that I didn’t even know they had left the planet.”

Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. “They went to live provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere–perhaps Canaan; but it doesn’t matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with an obscure affection of the heart–“

“Oh, come now!” said Rulledge. “You’re not going to spring anything so pat as heart-disease on us?”

“Acton is all ears,” said Minver, nodding toward me. “He hears the weird note afar.”

The psychologist smiled. “I’m afraid you’re not interested. I’m not much interested myself in these unrelated instances.”

“Oh, no!” “Don’t!” “Do go on!” the different entreaties came, and after a little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: “I don’t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of death.” We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope resumed: “I shouldn’t say that he was a coward above other men I believe he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have been a character out of one of Tourguenief’s books, the idea of death was so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the projection of an alien horror into his life–a prenatal influence–“