lay the child on the bed in the corner. There wasn't anything else to
use, so I fanned the baby with my straw hat--until, finally, it got
away from North Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then
tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles
are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things
they said and did--it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it. As
I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the
door--one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That
child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral
was this breathless morning, with details that may not be written down.

LATER.

Somebody interrupted. And now it's long past midnight. I must try to
send you some answer to your letter. I have been thinking--the
combination may strike you as odd--of North Baxter Court and you. Not
that the happenings of yesterday were unusual. That is just it--they
come almost every day, things like that. And you, with your birds and
rustling trees and your lake--you keep a shiny pistol in the drawer of
your dressing-table, and write me the sort of letter that came from you
this morning. When all these people need _you_--these blind, dumb
animals, stumbling through the sordid, hopeless years--need you,
because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along
than they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut,
because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into
the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are,
and gives you the chance to become infinitely more--you, in the face of
all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and
write as you have done about God and the things that matter.