effort betrayed itself, she said, smiling: "How strange it is that you
see things for what they are like, and not for what they are!"

"Yes, it's a defect, I'm afraid, sometimes. Perhaps--"

"Perhaps what?" she prompted him in the pause he made.

"Nothing. I was wondering whether in some other possible life our
consciousness would not be more independent of what we have been than it
seems to be here." She looked askingly at him. "I mean whether there
shall not be something absolute in our existence, whether it shall not
realize itself more in each experience of the moment, and not be always
seeking to verify itself from the past."

"Isn't that what you think is the way with me already?" She turned upon
him smiling, and he perceived that in her New York version of a Parisian
costume, with her lace hat of summer make and texture and the vivid
parasol she twirled upon her shoulder, she was not only a very pretty
girl, but a fashionable one. There was something touching in the fact,
and a little bewildering. To the pretty girl, the fashionable girl, he
could have answered with a joke, but the stricken intelligence had a
claim to his seriousness. Now, especially, he noted what had from time
to time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which once
bound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recovery
otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally
the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which
there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had
intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a
disembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its contradiction of
an accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to become conviction.