"He is quite
forgotten," the attendant will say; be sure of it.'
'I think not.'
'To have had even a small reputation, and to have outlived it, is
a sort of anticipation of death. The man Edwin Reardon, whose
name was sometimes spoken in a tone of interest, is really and
actually dead. And what remains of me is resigned to that. I have
an odd fancy that it will make death itself easier; it is as if
only half of me had now to die.'
Biffen tried to give a lighter turn to the gloomy subject.
'Thinking of my fiery adventure,' he said, in his tone of dry
deliberation, 'I find it vastly amusing to picture you as a
witness at the inquest if I had been choked and consumed. No
doubt it would have been made known that I rushed upstairs to
save some particular piece of property--several people heard me
say so--and you alone would be able to conjecture what this was.
Imagine the gaping wonderment of the coroner's jury! The Daily
Telegraph would have made a leader out of me. "This poor man was
so strangely deluded as to the value of a novel in manuscript,
which it appears he had just completed, that he positively
sacrificed his life in the endeavour to rescue it from the
flames.
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