Said the Soul: ‘Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read the philosophers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore me vastly farther on my way. You were a Greek woman in a still earlier time--of a type which murders all simplicity. Your body and mind were haunted by perfervid imagination and both ached with the weight of it. You were made of twisted fires. I grew in _that_ day: grew burdenedly: grew distortedly.’ Always those Greek visions are my ‘half-familiar ghosts.’-- Said I: ‘Was I sometime a married woman?’ Said the Soul: ‘You were--in four separate ages. Which brought you and me singular solitude.’ Said I: ‘Was I always woman?’ Said the Soul: ‘You were once a young lad of fierce temper and were at twenty a madman. And died mad. No male body and brain could withstand and outface merely the emotional besiegings of _you_.’ Said I: ‘When I went mad, what of you?’ Said the Soul: ‘I fell asleep, and knew no rest, but dreamed.’ Said I: ‘Of what?’ Said the Soul: ‘Things I always dreamed in your mad lapses--poetry served very conscious and very hot: the material Color of the Sunshine: the musical Softness of the Dawns: the pulsing Thoughts in Girls’ Throats: the Scent of Water-Falls.’ The Soul has an airless voice which tells her meanings, beside her words and in their rhythm. Said I: ‘What do you, and how do you, with me now?’ Said the Soul: ‘I grow tired with you. Exasperated. Desperate. As if I too wore flesh. You are a deathly prison, a torture chamber. I turn everywhere and nowhere at all. You tire me--you wear me. I wait. I stay. Yet I move.’ She looked lovely, my Soul--and quite in and of this bitter-ish lovely world in its bloody bitter wrappings of bone and flesh. Around her neck was the Necklace she wore in all the ages, showing greenish in a dusk of gentian blue.-- All of it slyly garbles and cross-purposes me a little bit more than usual. I wish I’d been born a Wild Boar. _Not quite voilà-tout_ To-morrow The clearest lights on persons are small salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life. To know that a woman is ‘sensitive’ is to have but a blurred conception of her as one easily impressed, easily hurt. But to know that she wears thick union-suitish under-clothes and uncompromising cotton stockings is to know much about her: by those tokens she is plain: she is stupid: she is smugly virtuous: she is poor: she is narrow-thoughted: she lacks imagination: she is prosaic: she has a defective sense of humor: she is catty: she is ‘kind’: she catches cold: she is a thoroughly good woman.