There’s nothing very bad about his dying. Death seems so terrible to you because you know so little about it. But I have seen so much of death, I have seen so many people die—and I know there is really nothing very terrible about it, and about the death of an old man ravaged by disease there is nothing terrible at all. It seems terrible to those looking on—there are,” he shrugged his fat shoulders, “there are sometimes—physical details that are unpleasant. But the old man knows little of all that: an old man dies as a clock runs down—he is worn out, has lost the will to live, he wants to die, and he just stops. That is all. And that will happen to your father.”
“Oh, but it will be so strange now—so hard to understand!” she muttered with a bewildered look in her eyes. “We have expected him to die so many times—we have been fooled so often—and now I can’t believe that it will ever happen. I thought that he would die in 1916, I never expected him to live another year; in 1918, the year that Ben died, none of us could see how he’d get through the winter—and then Ben died! No one had even thought of Ben—” her voice grew cracked and hoarse and her eyes glistened with tears. “We had forgotten Ben—everyone was thinking about Papa—and then when Ben died I turned against Papa for a time. For a while I was bitter against him—it seemed that I had done everything for this old man, that I had given him everything I had—my life, my strength, my energy—all because I thought that he was going to die—and then Ben, who had never been given anything—who had had nothing out of life—who had been neglected and forgotten by us all and who was the best one—the most decent of the whole crowd—Ben was the one who had to go. For a time after his death I didn’t care what happened—to Papa or to any one else. I was so bitter about Ben’s death—it seemed so cruel, so rotten and unjust—that it had to be Ben of all the people in the world—only twenty-six years old and without a thing to show for his life—no love, no children, no happiness, cheated out of everything, when Papa had had so much—I couldn’t stand the thought of it, even now I hate to go to Mama’s house, it almost kills me to go near Ben’s room, I’ve never been in it since the night he died—and somehow I was bitter against Papa! It seemed to me that he had cheated me, tricked me—at times I got so bitter that I thought that he was responsible in some way for Ben’s death. I said I was through with him, that I would do nothing else for him, that I had done all that I intended to do, and that somebody else would have to take care of him…. But it all came back; he had another bad spell and I was afraid that he was going to die,
