"Oh, no!" "Don't!" "Do go on!" the different entreaties came, and after a
little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: "I
don't know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of
death." We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope
resumed: "I shouldn't say that he was a coward above other men I believe
he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death
weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if
we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have
been a character out of one of Tourguenief's books, the idea of death was
so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a
part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have
had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the
projection of an alien horror into his life--a prenatal influence--"

"Jove!" Rulledge broke in. "I don't see how the women stand it. To look
forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they're
hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men's courage after that! I wonder
we're not _all_ marked.'

"I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond's history," said
Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.

Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, "What
do you fellows make of the terror that a two months' babe starts in its
sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own
hook?"

"We don't make anything of it," the psychologist answered. "Perhaps the
pathologists do."