Ah! her face! How can I describe it? It was much sweeter afterwards,
but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
flesh crept. She was going to die.

Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.