I grew so haunted with this oppressive thought, that my wife could not but notice my trouble.  But how could I tell her of the spectral inverted commas that dodged every move of her dear head?—­tell her that our own original firstborn, just beginning to talk as never baby talked, was an unblushing plagiarism of his great-great-great-grandfather, that our love was nothing but the expansion of a line of Keats, and that our whole life was one hideous mockery of originality?  ‘Woman,’ I felt inclined to shriek, ’be yourself, and not your great-grandmother.  A man may not marry his great-grandmother.  For God’s sake let us all be ourselves, and not ghastly mimicries of our ancestors, or our neighbours.  Let us shake ourselves free from this evil dream of imitation.  Merciful Heaven, it is killing me!’ But surely that was a quotation too, and, accidentally catching sight of the back of my hand, suddenly the tears sprang to my eyes, for it was just so the big soft veins used to be on the hands of my father, when a little boy I prayed between his knees.  He was gone, but here was his hand—­his hand, not mine!

Then an idea possessed me.  There was but one way.  I could die.  There was a little phial of laudanum in the medicine-cupboard that always leered at me from among the other bottles like a serpent’s eye.  Thrice happy thought!  Who would miss such a poor imitation?  Even the mere soap-vending tradesmen bid us ‘beware of imitations.’  Dark wine of forgetfulness....  No, that was a quotation.  However, here was the phial.  I drew the cork, inhaled for a moment the hard dry odour of poppies, and prepared to drink.  But just at that moment I seemed to hear a horrid little laugh coming out of the bottle, and a voice chuckled at my ear:  ’You ass, do you call that original?’ It was so absurd that I burst out into hysterical laughter.  Here had I been about to do the most ‘banal’ thing of all.  Was there anything in the world quite so commonplace as suicide?

And with the good spirits of laughter came peace.  Nay, why worry to be ‘original’?  Why such haste to be unlike the rest of the world, when the best things of life were manifestly those which all men had in common?  Was love less sweet because my next-door neighbour knew it as well?  Would the same reason make death less bitter?  And were not those tender diminutives all the more precious, because their vowels had been rounded for us by the sweet lips of lovers dead and gone?—­sainted jewels, still warm from the beat of tragic bosoms, flowers which their kisses had freighted with immortal meanings.

And then I bethought me how the meadow-daisies were one as the other, and how, when the pearly shells of the dog rose settled on the hedge like a flight of butterflies, one was as the other; how the birds sang alike, how star was twin with star, and in peas is no distinction.  My rhetoric stopped as I was about to say ’as wife is to wife’—­for I thought I would first kiss her and see:  and lo!  I was once more perplexed, for as I looked down into her eyes, simple and blue and deep, as the sky is simple and blue and deep, I declared her to be the only woman in the world—­which was obviously not exact.  But it was true, for all that.