"Have you ever seen anyone die?"
"Of course," Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. "Let me see." She made a mental calculation. "I've seen five people die. Six, if you count babies."
"I hadn't seen anyone die when I was your age."
"You hadn't?"
"Only a dog."
"Dogs die easier than people. They don't talk about it beforehand."
"How do you feel about. . . about people dying?"
"Well, it isn't nearly so bad as having babies. That's awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn't hurt at all. They've turned off the pain."
"Believe it or not," said Will, "I've never seen a baby being born."
"Never?" Mary Sarojini was astonished. "Not even when you were at school?"
Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-in Hospital. "Not even at school," he said aloud.
"You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?"
"In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."
The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. "Crazy," she said. "Or were your teachers just stupid?"