at all, which isn’t often likely.”

“D’you think they come back?” said Phyl.

“My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you’d say I was plum crazy. But I’ll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them? There’s no such laziness in nature. I don’t say there aren’t folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N’York women—but they don’t count. They’re against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven’t ever lived.” 130 Then, vehemently: “Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin’ about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people—which is the sensible way and there’s nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don’t say there aren’t ghosts, there are, for I’ve seen ’em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn’t the making of a man, so he couldn’t come back as a man, and he wasn’t a woman, so he couldn’t come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don’t suppose he’d have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn’t die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body—which isn’t a bit more than a suit of clothes—he gets a new one. If he hasn’t piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he’s a ghost. That’s my way of thinking and I know—I know—n’matter.”

130

She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring.

It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine. 131

131

Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don’t want to hear it—or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other 

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