The Dying of Francis Donne by Ernest Dowson

The faces of his acquaintance, the faces of the students at his lectures, the faces of Francis Donne's colleagues at the hospital, were altered; were, at least, sensibly altered to his morbid self- consciousness. In every one whom he encountered, he detected, or fancied that he detected, an attitude of evasion, a hypocritical air of ignoring a fact that was obvious and unpleasant. Was it so obvious, then, the hidden horror which he carried incessantly about him? Was his secret, which he would still guard so jealously, become a by-word and an anecdote in his little world? And a great rage consumed him against the inexorable and inscrutable forces which had made him to destroy him; against himself, because of his proper impotence; and, above all, against the living, the millions who would remain when he was no longer, the living, of whom many would regret him (some of them his personality, and morc, his skill), because he could see under all the unconscious hypocrisy of their sorrow, the exultant self- satisfaction of their survival.

And with his burning sense of helplessness, of a certain bitter injustice in things, a sense of sharne mingled; all the merely physical dishonour of death shaping itself to his sick and morbid fancy into a violent symbol of whlt was, as it were, an actual moral or intellectual dishonour. Was not death, too, inevitable and natural an operation as it was, essentially a process to undergo apart and hide jealously, as much as other natural and ignoble processes of the body?