"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.