 under the knife, by H. G. Wells. What if I die under it? The thought recurred again and again as I walked home from Haddon's. It was purely a personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped of glamour in a clear dry light during that walk from Haddon's house over Primrose Hill. The were the friends of my youth. I perceive now that our affection was a tradition which we foregathered rather laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career. I suppose I had been cold-bloodied or undemonstrative. One perhaps implies the other. It may be even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of a friend, but as I walked home that afternoon, the emotional side of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me. I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature. No doubt a concomitant of my stagnating physiology, and my thoughts wandered off along the line it suggested. Once before in my hot youth, I had suffered a sudden loss of blood and had been within an ace of death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me, leaving scarcely anything but a tranquil resignation, a draig of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions and tendernesses and all the complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. Now again I was bloodless. I'd been feeding down for a week or more. I was not even hungry. It occurred to me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher emotions, the more moral feelings, even the subtle tendernesses of love, are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal. They are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes, and it may be that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose it Sample complete. Ready to continue?