They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a light plunged into a stream.
But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water.

To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting.

To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,--that was not love's meaning.
And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of the poppies of death.

The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and foolish and in a dream.

All they love on earth is passing away beneath their very eyes, and they cannot understand,--cannot realise that this, _this_ is death.
Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest being its own anaesthetic), Theophil never realised that Jenny had died, and least of all at the moment when she was dying.