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Children, is left to do as he pleases with the children. For a while: Sam has laid up for himself treasures that moth and rust can’t corrupt, but that the mere passage of the years destroys. Children don’t keep. In the end Sam will have to love those hard things to love, grown-ups; and, since this is impossible for Sam, Sam won’t despair, won’t change, but will simply get himself some more children. He has made the beings of this world, who are the ends of this world, means; when he loses some particular means what does it matter?—there are plenty of other means to that one end, Sam.
    The process the book calls Louie is that of a child turning into a grown-up, a duckling turning into a swan, a being that exists in two worlds leaving the first world of the family for the world outside. The ugly duckling loves the other pretty ducklings and tries to save them from the awful war between the father duck and the mother duck—though the war is ended by Henny’s act, not Louie’s. Yet Louie knows that they are not really her brothers and sisters, not really her parents, and serenely leaves them for the swan-world in which, a swan, she will at least be reunited to her real family, who are swans. Or do swans have families? Need families? Who knows? Louie doesn’t know and, for a while, doesn’t need to care.
    The last fourth of the book makes Ernie, the child closest to Henny, a queer shadow or echo of Henny. The episodes of Ernie’s lead, Ernie’s money box, and Ernie’s beating bring him to a defeated despair like Henny’s, to a suicide-in-effigy: he makes a doll-dummy to stand for himself and hangs it. But all this is only a child’s “as if” performance—after Henny’s death the penniless Ernie is given some money, finds some more money, forgets Henny, and starts out all over again on the financial process which his life will be.
    The attempted murder and accomplished suicide that are the conclusion of Henny and the climax of The Man Who Loved Children are prepared for by several hundred events, conversations, speeches, phrases, and thoughts scattered throughout the book. Henny’s suicide- or murder-rhetoric; the atmosphere of violence that hangs around her, especially where Sam and Louie are concerned; the conversation in which she discusses with her mother and sister the best ways to kill oneself, the quickest poisons: these and a great many similar things have established, even before the sixty or seventy pages leading directly to Henny’s death, a situation that makes plausible—requires, really—her violent end. And yet we are surprised to have it happen, this happening as thoroughly prepared for as anything I can remember in fiction.
    It is no “tragic flaw” in Henny’s character, but her character itself, that brings her to her end: Henny is her own fate. Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us—” or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it. Henny’s old age may be life’s decision about Henny; her suicide is the decision she has made about herself—about life—without ever knowing she was making it. She is so used to thinking and saying: I’ll kill myself! Better kill myself! that when Louie gives her the chance she is fatally ready to take it. The defeated, despairing Henny has given up her life many times, before that drinking of the breakfast cup of tea with which she gives it up for good. What life has made of Henny, what Henny most deeply is, drinks—she is never more herself than when she destroys herself.
    Many things in her life are latent or ultimate causes of Henny’s death; but its immediate, overt causes—the series of extraordinarily imagined and accomplished finalities that leads to this final finality, that demands as its only possible conclusion Henny’s death—all occur in the sixty or seventy pages before that death. At the beginning of the series, there is