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A BIOGRAPHY
291
thinks, they all shall gradually come to think; even as the rising
generation does now. He remembers especially a deep-souled
girl whose sympathy has gone out to him. He begins to dream,
but rouses himself to go and kiss his wife and tell her of his
triumphs, when, at that moment, he hears a sharp knock at the
door. He opens it, and there stand the gendarmes who have
come to arrest him.
Eagerly as Sonya had often invoked death, she had
at this moment no wish to die. But those friends who
were near her at the last thought her more resigned
than she had been formerly. She no longer yearned
for that complete happiness the ideal of which had
ever consumed her soul with its burning flame. But
she now longed, with ardent, clinging love, for the
broken gleams of the happiness which had of låte
cast a light upon her path.
In her innermost heart she was afraid of the great
unknown. She often said that it was the possibility of
punishment in the other world which alone kept her
back from leaving this one. She had no definite
religious belief, but she believed in the eternal life of each
individual soul. She believed, and she trembled.
She was especially afraid of the awful moment at
which earthly life ends. She often quoted Hamlet’s
words:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
With her vivid imagination she pictured those awful
moments which perhaps may occur when the body,
physically speaking, is dead, but the nervous system
still lives and suffers — suffers a nameless martyrdom,
known by none but by those who have taken the dread
leap into the great darkness.
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