Between the Dark and the Daylight by William Dean Howells
page 24 of 181 (13%)
page 24 of 181 (13%)
|
those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world."
She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said: "Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their misery was going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark, heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing, for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us." "Yes," she said, in her turn, "I have noticed that. But don't you sometimes--sometimes"--she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping--"have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?" "Oh yes; that occurs to every one." "But don't you--don't you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence--" She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the experience which young people make much of when they have it, and sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested: "'For something is, or something seems, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.' These weird impressions are no more than that, probably." "Ah, I don't believe it," the girl said. "They are too real for that. They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more |
|