The transformation called Death may be something as beautiful and
dazzling as the transformation called Love. It may make the dead man
'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the
less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind.
A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the
inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as
she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty,
shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily
to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a
thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically,
mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your
life, wholly from outside--is it not natural, given her temperament,
that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let
us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not
they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in
the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is
their final home and rest.
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