And this, I think, was the disquieting sensation that perplexed me chiefly with a sense of unstable equilibrium. The idea of pre-existence, with its huge weight of memory lost and actions undischarged, pressed upon a portion of my soul that was trying to awake. The foundations of my known personality appeared suddenly insecure, and what the brain denied, this other part accepted, even half remembered. The change of consciousness in me was growing. While observing Mrs. LeVallon, listening to the spontaneous laughter that ran between her sentences, meeting her quick eyes that took in everything about them, these varied and contradictory judgments of my own worked their inevitable effect upon me. The quasi-memory, with its elusive fragrance of far-off, forgotten things; the promised reconstruction of passionate emotions that had burned the tissues of our earlier bodies before even the foundations of these “eternal” hills were laid; the sense of being again among ancient friends, netted by deathless forces of spiritual adventure and desire—Julius, his wife, myself, mutually involved in the intricate pattern of our souls’ development:—all this, while I strove to regard it as mere telepathic reflection from his own beliefs, yet made something in me, deeper than any ratiocination, stand up and laugh in my face with the authoritative command that it was absolutely—true.
Our very intimacy, so readily established as of its own accord—established, moreover, among such unlikely and half antagonistic elements—seemed to hint at a relationship resumed, instead of now first beginning. The fact that the three of us took so much for granted almost suggested memory. For the near presence of this woman—I call her woman, though she was but girl—disturbed me more than uncommonly; and this curious, soft delight I felt raging in the depths of me—whence did it come? Whence, too, the depth and power of other feelings that she roused in me, their reckless quality, their certainty, the haunting pang and charm that her face, not even pretty apart from its disfigurement, stirred in my inmost being? There was mischief and disaster in her sea-green eyes, though neither mischief nor disaster quite of this material world.
I confessed—the first time for many years—to something moving beyond ordinary. More and more I longed to learn of her first meeting with the man she had married, and by what method he claimed to have recognised in this servant girl the particular ancient soul he waited for, and by what unerring instinct he had picked her out and set her upon so curious a throne.
I watched the velvet band about the well-shaped neck....
“I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.