She moved her lips in refusal.
"Stop, Robby.
You have to live a long time yet.
I want you to keep well and have children and a wife."
"I'm having neither children, nor wife, except you.
You are my child and my wife."
She lay still awhile.
"I would like to have had a child of yours, Robby," said she then, leaning her cheek on my shoulder. "I never wanted it before.
I just couldn't imagine it.
But now I often think about it.
It must be nice when something of one remains.
Then sometimes when the child would look at you, you would remember me.
And I'd be there again for the time being."
"We'll have a child yet," said I. "When you're well again.
I'd like to have a child of yours, Pat.
But it must be a girl, and be called Pat."
She took the glass from my hand and drank a sip.
"Perhaps it's as well we haven't one, darling.
You must forget me.
And if you do think of me, it must only be to think it was a good time with us—nothing else.
It's over, that we'll never understand.
But you mustn't be sad."
"I'm sad when you talk so."
She looked at me for some time.
"When you lie like this, you do think a lot.
And all sorts of things strike you as strange that you wouldn't even have noticed otherwise.
Do you know what I can't understand now?
That two people should love as we do, and yet one die."
"Be still," said I. "In life one or the other has to die first.
But we're not that far by a long way yet."
"People should die, only when they're alone.
Or when they hate—not when they love."
I forced a smile.
"Yes, Pat," said I, taking her hot hands in mine; "if we had the making of the world it would look better, eh?"
She nodded.
"Yes, darling.
We wouldn't allow things like that.
If only one knew what's behind it.
Do you think it goes on, afterwards?" "Yes," said I. "It's so badly made it doesn't know how to stop."
She smiled.
"That's one explanation, I suppose.
But do you find this so badly made too?"
She pointed to a bunch of yellow roses beside her bed.
"That's just it," I replied; "the details are wonderful, but the whole has no sense.
As if it had been made by a madman who could think of nothing better to do with the marvellous variety of life that he had created but to annihilate it again."
"And to make it afresh," said Pat.
"I see no sense in that either. So 'far it hasn't got any better as a result."
"Anyway, darling," said Pat, "he hasn't done so badly by us.
That couldn't have been better; Only too short. Far too short."
A few days later I felt a prickling in my chest and coughed.