He may even be humorous if he will.
It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.
At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead.

But on the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy.

They said nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground.
There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.
"If I believed in a Creator" (it was the man who spoke), "I should want to know what pleasure he found in creating that poor little woman." The woman did not answer as she looked at him.
"Yet," he went on, "I'm selfish enough to be glad that she lived.

If I had not known Miss Quincey, I should not have known you." "And I," said the woman, and her face was rosy under the touch of grief, "if I had not loved Miss Quincey, I could not have loved you." They seemed to think Miss Quincey had justified her existence.

Perhaps she had.
And the woman took the roses that she wore in her belt and laid them on the breast of the grave.