He was looking partly at the river, at the pines, at the flaming tree, and partly at the human embodiment of the richness and color of autumn before him.  After a time Sylvia said:  “There’s Cassandra.  She’s the only one who knows of the impending doom.  She’s trying to warn the pines.”  It had taken her some moments to think of this.

Page accepted it with no sign that he considered it anything remarkable, with the habit of a man for whom people produced their best:  “She’s using some very fine language for her warning, but like some other fine language it’s a trifle misapplied.  She forgets that no doom hangs over the pines. She’s the fated one.  They’re safe enough.”

Sylvia clasped her hands about her knees and looked across the dark water at the somber trees.  “And yet they don’t seem to be very cheerful about it.”  It was her opinion that they were talking very cleverly.

“Perhaps,” suggested Page, rolling over to face the river—­“perhaps she’s not prophesying doom at all, but blowing a trumpet-peal of exultation over her own good fortune.  The pines may be black with envy of her.”

Sylvia enjoyed this rather macabre fancy with all the zest of healthful youth, secure in the conviction of its own immortality.  “Yes, yes, life’s ever so much harder than death.”

Page dissented with a grave irony from the romantic exaggeration of this generalization.  “I don’t suppose the statistics as to the relative difficulty of life and death are really very reliable.”

Sylvia perceived that she was being, ever so delicately, laughed at, and tried to turn her remark so that she could carry it off.  “Oh, I don’t mean for those who die, but those who are left know something about it, I imagine.  My mother always said that the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.  She said you might miss everything else irrevocable and vital—­falling in love, having children, accomplishing anything—­but that sooner or later you have to reckon with losing somebody dear to you.”  She spoke with an academic interest in the question.

“I should think,” meditated Page, taking the matter into serious consideration, “that the vitalness of even that experience would depend somewhat on the character undergoing it.  I’ve known some temperaments of a proved frivolity which seemed to have passed through it without any great modifications.  But then I know nothing about it personally.  I lost my father before I could remember him, and since then I haven’t happened to have any close encounter with such loss.  My mother, you know, is very much alive.”

“Well, I haven’t any personal experience with death in my immediate circle either,” said Sylvia.  “But I wasn’t brought up with the usual cult of the awfulness of it.  Father was always anxious that we children should feel it something as natural as breathing—­you are dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours you back.  If you’ve been worth living, there are more elements of fineness in humanity.”