confidence, you know--if he really and truly thought it was wrong for a
person to kill herself. I can't see why." She glanced at the
attentive, quiet figure at the window. "Do you think so?" she asked.
He looked at her, but did not speak. She went on. "Why is it wrong?
They say God gives life and only God should take it away. Why? It's
given--we don't ask for it, and no conditions come with it. Why should
one, if it gets unendurable, keep an unasked, unwanted gift? If
somebody put a ball of bright metal into your hands and it was pretty
at first and nice to play with, and then turned red-hot, and hurt,
wouldn't it be silly to go on holding it? I don't know much about God,
anyway," she went on a bit forlornly; not irreverently, but as if pain
had burned off the shell of conventions and reserves of every day, and
actual facts lay bare. "I don't feel as if He were especially
real--and the case I'm in is awfully real. I don't know if He would
mind my killing myself--and if He would, wouldn't He understand I just
have to? If He's really good? But then, if He was angry, might He
punish me forever, afterward?" She drew her shoulders together with a
frightened, childish movement. "I'm afraid of forever," she said.

The rain beat in noisily against the parish house wall; the wet vines
flung about wildly; a floating end blew in at the window and the young
man lifted it carefully and put it outside again. Then, "Can you tell
me why you want to kill yourself?" he asked, and his manner, free from
criticism or disapproval, seemed to quiet her.

"Yes. I want to tell you. I came here to tell the rector." The grave
eyes of the man, eyes whose clearness and youth seemed to be such an
age-old youth and clearness as one sees in the eyes of the sibyls in
the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel--eyes empty of a thought of self,
impersonal, serene with the serenity of a large atmosphere--the