The Angel appears to have made a slight Mistake.

I felt a certain curiosity.  We had been getting on very well together—so it had seemed to me.  I asked him if he would mind my seeing the book.  He said there could be no objection.  He opened it at the page devoted to myself, and I flew a little higher, and looked down over his shoulder.  I can hardly believe it, even now—that I could have dreamt anything so foolish:

He had got it all down wrong!

Instead of to the credit side of my account he had put the whole bag of tricks to my debit.  He had mixed them up with my sins—with my acts of hypocrisy, vanity, self-indulgence.  Under the head of Charity he had but one item to my credit for the past six months: my giving up my seat inside a tramcar, late one wet night, to a dismal-looking old woman, who had not had even the politeness to say “thank you,” she seemed just half asleep.  According to this idiot, all the time and money I had spent responding to these charitable appeals had been wasted.

I was not angry with him, at first.  I was willing to regard what he had done as merely a clerical error.

“You have got the items down all right,” I said (I spoke quite friendly), “but you have made a slight mistake—we all do now and again; you have put them down on the wrong side of the book.  I only hope this sort of thing doesn’t occur often.”

What irritated me as much as anything was the grave, passionless face the Angel turned upon me.

“There is no mistake,” he answered.

“No mistake!” I cried.  “Why, you blundering—”

He closed the book with a weary sigh.

I felt so mad with him, I went to snatch it out of his hand.  He did not do anything that I was aware of, but at once I began falling.  The faint luminosity beneath me grew, and then the lights of London seemed shooting up to meet me.  I was coming down on the clock tower at Westminster.  I gave myself a convulsive twist, hoping to escape it, and fell into the river.

And then I awoke.

But it stays with me: the weary sadness of the Angel’s face.  I cannot shake remembrance from me.  Would I have done better, had I taken the money I had spent upon these fooleries, gone down with it among the poor myself, asking nothing in return.  Is this fraction of our superfluity, flung without further thought or care into the collection box, likely to satisfy the Impracticable Idealist, who actually suggested—one shrugs one’s shoulders when one thinks of it—that one should sell all one had and give to the poor?