Part Three - A Primaeval Heritage

She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr.
Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the
dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure
himself, hushed and stilled by his association with everlasting
stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew
now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent. A strange life
he must have had. She had never thought of it till she had seen him come
into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed,
not knowing what to do. Into how many such houses he must have gone,
with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody
knew was coming sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all. How
extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old
as she was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody
in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you
really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or
change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up. That
threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it always comes as
a shock," that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in
life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would
happen to you.