He felt that the old woman had risen.  She was moving towards them.  He said quietly: 

“At least I can relieve you.”

She made a passionate, absolute gesture of refusal.  An astonished nurse had entered.  He gave brief instructions.  He said good-night, not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out.

He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life.

But he knew also that he had fled from her.

In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his youth.  There were little old women who were Christines, and even James Stonehouse was there, tragically and hopefully in search of something that he had never found.  Any moment he might turn his face towards his son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.

It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.

Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives touched his on every side.  It became a sort of secret pressure.  They were neither great nor beautiful.  They were identical with the people he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great distance.  He was down in the thick of them.  They concerned him—­or he had no other concern.  He was part of their strangely wandering procession.  He looked into their separate faces and thought:  “This man says ‘I’ to himself.  And one day he will say:  ‘I am dying’ (as Marie Dubois said it).”  And he recognized for the first time something common to them all that was not commonplace—­an heroic quality.  At least that stark fact remained that at their birth sentence of death had been passed upon them all.  Before each one of them lay a black adventure, and they went towards it, questioning or inarticulate, not knowing why they should endure so much, but facing the utter loneliness of that final passage with patience and great courage.

It was not ridiculous that they should demand their immortality, the least and worst of them.  Whether it was granted them or not, it was a just demand, and the answer to it more vital than any other form of knowledge.  For it was conceivable that one day they would be too strong and too proud to play the part of tragic buffoons in a senseless farce.

In the meantime men might well be pitiful with one another.

“What was it she had said?”

“Nothing that you’ve gone through is of any use if it hasn’t taught you pity.”

("Oh, Francey, Francey, if I had told you that Christine was dead would it have helped?  Would you have had more patience with me?”)