My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles. My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress. In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me--a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue. I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is _mine_, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold! We talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the chill sweet contempt. She answers me from her cool old tranquil viewpoint, which is near me yet remote. We talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she wore. Said the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny steppe. I was there with you as presently as now--as sentient, as perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’ I have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was quiescent to her filth and ignorance. Said I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’ Said the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar--you lied your way out of many a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of your life uncringing, and you died game.’ Said I: ‘How did I die?’ Said the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to refuse--and I fled away upon the instant.’ Said I: ‘I half-knew it--she died a violent death. You--were you glad to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’ Said the Soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey. Motives--motif--back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at leaving you.’ Said I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly fine.’