Explore "Playing Dead" by Richard Harding Davis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To fate, "Jimmie" Blagwin had signalled the "supreme gesture. " He had accomplished the Great Adventure. He was dead.
And as he sat on his trunk in the tiny hall bedroom, and in the afternoon papers read of his suicide, his eyes were lit with pleasurable pride. Not at the nice things the obituaries told of his past, but because his act of self-sacrifice, so carefully considered, had been carried to success. As he read Jimmie smiled with self-congratulation. He felt glad he was alive; or, to express it differently, felt glad he was dead. And he hoped Jeanne, his late wife, now his widow, also would be glad. But not _too_ glad. In return for relieving Jeanne of his presence he hoped she might at times remember him with kindness. Of her always would he think gratefully and tenderly. Nothing could end his love for Jeanne -- not even this suicide.