never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in
believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried her
ourselves; and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we
could arrange to sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These
women are so artful!

But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life
again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage.
They are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most
disheartening to the murderers.

And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think
of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and
still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it.
They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of
feet high and, bless you, it does them good--it is like a tonic to
them.

As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply
can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature
and mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that
man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his
invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and
shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents,
and such like sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but
it is no good your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him,
because it can't.

There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance,
but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will