boughs from some young maples that he had found all red in a swamp. She
showed herself so interested that he asked her to come with him after
their midday dinner and see them, and she said perhaps she would, if he
would promise not to keep talking about the things that made her so
miserable. He asked her, 'What things?' and she answered that he knew
well enough, and he laughed and promised.

"She didn't believe he would keep his word, but he did at first, and he
tried not to tease her in any way. He tried to please her in the whims
and fancies she had about going this way or that, and when she decided
not to look up his young maples with him, because the first autumn leaves
made her melancholy, he submitted. He put his arm across her shoulder as
they drove through the woods, and pulled her to him, and called her 'poor
old thing,' and accused her of being morbid. He wanted her to tell him
all there was in her mind, but she could not; she could only cry on his
arm. He asked her if it was something about him that troubled her, and
she could only say that she hated to see people so cheerful without
reason. That made him laugh, and they were very gay after she had got her
cry out; but he grew serious again. Then her temper rose, and she asked,
'Well, what is it?' and he said at first, 'Oh, nothing,' as people do
when there is really something, and presently he confessed that he was
thinking about what she had said of his being cheerful without reason.
Then, as she said, he talked so beautifully that she had to keep her
patience with him, though he was not keeping his word to her. His talk,
as far as she was able to report it, didn't amount to much more than
this: that in a world where death was, people never could be cheerful
with reason unless death was something altogether different from what
people imagined. After people came to their intellectual consciousness,
death was never wholly out of it, and if they could be joyful with that
black drop at the bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death