"They must have been difficult years," I said, and again cursed myself
for my banality.
"They were," he answered very gravely, "Very difficult."
"And your other thoughts?" I asked him.
"They were about death," he replied. "I had, from my very earliest
years, a great terror of death. You might think that my life was not
so pleasant that I should mind, very greatly, leaving it. But I was
always thinking--hoping that I should live to be very old, even though
I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of
some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a
quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about
another life--I couldn't bear all the introductions and the clumsy
mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than
that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was a
very ugly old man, bent and whitened and gnarled, a face and hands
twisted with rheumatism. I used to call him Quilp to myself.
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