All Nepenthe had stood by the side of the grave—­all, save only Mr. Keith.  He remained at home.  And this was rather odd, for it is the right thing to attend people’s funerals, and Mr. Keith prided himself upon always doing the right thing.  It was his boast to pass for a typical Anglo-Saxon, the finest race on earth, when all is said and done; and he used to point out that you could not be a typical Anglo-Saxon unless you respected yourself, and you could not respect yourself unless you respected simultaneously your neighbours and their habits, however perverse they might sometimes appear.  Now a funeral, being unavoidable, cannot by an prestidigitations of logic be called perverse.  All the more reason for being present.  But for a strange twist or kink in his nature, therefore, he would have been on the spot.  He would have turned up in the market-place to the minute, since he prided himself likewise upon his love of punctuality, declaring that it was one of the many virtues he possessed in common with Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

He disliked funerals.  For all his open mind and open bowels, Mr. Keith displayed an unreasoning hatred of death and, what was still more remarkable, not the least shame in confessing it.

“The next interment I purpose to attend,” he would say, “will be my own.  May if be far off!  No; I don’t care about funerals and the suggestion they convey.  A cowardly attitude?  I think not.  The coward refuses to face a fact.  Death is a fact.  I have often faced him.  He is not a pretty fellow.  Most men only give him a shy glance out of a corner of their eye.  It scares them out of their wits and makes them say all sorts of snobbishly respectful things about him.  Sheer flummery!  It is with Death as it is with God—­we call them good because we are afraid of what they can do to us.  That accounts for our politeness.  Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a villainous institution.  Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed or circumvented or crushed outright.  But here is a damnable spectre who knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, ‘Come in.’  Hateful!  If other people think differently it is because they live differently.  How do they live?  Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark hole, and now spends its time wondering how it managed to get such a sore behind.  Such persons may well be gladdened by the approach of death.  It is the best thing they can do—­to depart from world which they call a dark hole, a world which was obviously not made for them, seeing that they are always feeling uncomfortable about one thing or another.  Good riddance to them and their moral stomach-aches.”

Mr. Keith professed never to feel uncomfortable.  Oh, no!  He had no moral stomach-aches.  Unlike other folks, he “reacted to external stimuli in appropriate fashion,” he cultivated the “function of the real,” he always knew how to “dominate his reflexes.”  His neural currents were “duly co-ordinated.”  Mr. Keith was in love with life.  It dealt fairly with him.  It made him loth to bid farewell to this gracious earth and the blue sky overhead, to his cooks and his books, his gardeners and roses and flaming cannas; loth to exchange these things of love, these tangible delights, for a hideous and everlasting annihilation.