“Why should I not let him have his rosy sunset?” she thought.  “It is all he hopes for—­cares for, I think—­poor fellow!  Am I not good enough to give him that?  What does it matter about me, if it is all but a vision that flits between heaven and earth, and makes a passing shadow on human brain and nerves?—­a tale that is telling—­then a tale that is told!  Much the good people make out of their better faith!  Should I be troubled to learn that it was indeed a lasting sleep?  If I were dead, and found myself waking, should I want to rise, or go to sleep again?  Why should not I too dare to hope for an endless rest?  Where would be the wrong to any?  If there be a God, He will have but to wake me to punish me hard enough.  Why should I not hope at least for such a lovely thing?  Can any one help desiring peace?  Oh, to sleep, and sleep, and wake no more forever and ever!  I would not hasten the sleep; the end will surely come, and why should we not enjoy the dream a little longer—­at least while it is a good dream, and the tossing has not begun?  There would always be a time.  Why wake before our time out of the day into the dark nothing?  I should always want to see what to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow would bring—­that is, so long as he loved me.  He is noble, and sad, and beautiful, and gracious!—­but would he—­could he love me to the end—­even if—?  Why should we not make the best of what we have?  Why should we not make life as happy to ourselves and to others as we can—­however worthless, however arrant a cheat it may be?  Even if there be no such thing as love, if it be all but a lovely vanity, a bubble-play of color, why not let the bubble-globe swell, and the tide of its ocean of color flow and rush and mingle and change?  Will it not break at last, and the last come soon enough, when of all the glory is left but a tear on the grass?  When we dream a pleasant dream, and know it is but a dream, we will to dream on, and quiet our minds that it may not be scared and flee:  why should we not yield to the stronger dream, that it may last yet another sweet, beguiling moment?  Why should he not love me—­kiss me?  Why should we not be sad together, that we are not and can not be the real man and woman we would—­that we are but the forms of a dream—­the fleeting shadows of the night of Nature?—­mourn together that the meddlesome hand of fate should have roused us to consciousness and aspiration so long before the maturity of our powers that we are but a laughter—­no—­a scorn and a weeping to ourselves?  We could at least sympathize with each other in our common misery—­bear with its weakness, comfort its regrets, hide its mortifications, cherish its poor joys, and smooth the way down the steepening slope to the grave!  Then, if in the decrees of blind fate, there should be a slow, dull procession toward perfection, if indeed some human God be on the way to be born, it would be grand, although we should know nothing of it, to have done our part fearless and hopeless, to have lived and died that the triumphant Sorrow might sit throned on the ever dying heart of the universe.  But never, never would I have chosen to live for that!  Yes, one might choose to be born, if there were suffering one might live or die to soften, to cure!  That would be to be like Paul Faber.  To will to be born for that would be grand indeed!”