"No, no! She couldn't be. I was wrong there. But she will be different. Grant that at any rate. When you go forward to speak to her, she may not remember--very many things _you_ may remember. Things that happened at Frognal--dear romantic walks through the Sunday summer evenings, practically you two alone, you in your adolescent silk hat and your nice gentlemanly gloves.... Perhaps that did not happen here! And she may have other memories--of things--that down there haven't happened. You noted her costume. She wasn't by any chance one of the samurai?" He answers, with a note of satisfaction, "No! She wore a womanly dress of greyish green." "Probably under the Lesser Rule." "I don't know what you mean by the Lesser Rule. She wasn't one of the samurai." "And, after all, you know--I keep on reminding you, and you keep on losing touch with the fact, that this world contains your double." He pales, and his countenance is disturbed. Thank Heaven, I've touched him at last! "This world contains your double. But, conceivably, everything may be different here. The whole romantic story may have run a different course. It was as it was in our world, by the accidents of custom and proximity. Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period. You are a man to form great affections,--noble, great affections. You might have met anyone almost at that season and formed the same attachment." For a time he is perplexed and troubled by this suggestion. "No," he says, a little doubtfully. "No. It was herself." ... Then, emphatically, "No!" Section 4 For a time we say no more, and I fall musing about my strange encounter with my Utopian double. I think of the confessions I have just made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself. I have stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pride that has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have not troubled me for years. There are things that happened to me in my adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy--I have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten--and yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it comes into my mind--I do my best to prevent it--there it is, and these detestable people blot out the stars for me. I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened with understanding eyes. But for a little while those squalid memories will not sink back into the deeps. We lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such egotistical absorptions, quite heedless of the great palace of noble dreams to which our first enterprise has brought us. Section 5