Said the Soul: ‘You were honest since you made no pretense of any kind to yourself. You took no gold that you did not logically, humanly or shamefully earn. You were consciously and unconsciously above all subterfuge. You wrought no ruin nor error nor darkness upon your own spirit or any other. You deceived neither yourself nor anyone about you. The tone of your life was of sun-shining simplicity and cleanness. There was no greed in you. You saw your way of life before you and lived it without degradation, with a positiveness of strength.’ It is as if my Soul’s view and mine were infinitely separate from being narrowly paralleled. The portrait was mystically familiar: but not by her light. Said I: ‘Was she beautiful to look at?’ Said the Soul: ‘You were beautiful in a pallid saintlike French manner--an uncertain type of beauty which fatigue or depression turns to plainness. You had but little light charm of prettiness. But you had what counts for more than beauty: the nerve and verve of attractiveness, the force and fascination of physical being, the fragrance, the _flair_ of the deeply-sexed woman. In one phase you were constantly preying and preyed upon, but with high valors of attack and endurance.’ Said I: ‘Did she live in peace--had she no times of suffering?’ Said the Soul: ‘You had hours of violent bitter suffering. Paris has always accepted without countenancing the properous cocotte. And often you were infamously insulted at street-crossings by soldiers and _sergeants-de-ville_ as you drove out in your small bright-colored carriage. And you were hailed with opprobrious appropriate names by the ragged populace as they picked up silver pieces which you threw among them. Such things were stinging brands and lashes to you. But you bore yourself with entire courage. You gave much money to churches and charities but looked on such acts in yourself rightly as some slight weakness which would, however, be of benefit to the starving poor. I can not describe--so you could grasp it--the peace, the expansion, the freedom for me in that life and in that attitude.’ The exact outlook of the Soul throws over me a veil of wistfulness, bewilderness, freedness, lostness which hides the material moorings of my life and casts me adrift on broad clouded seas. Said I: ‘What was the end of that--how did she die?’