“No,” seemingly quite conscious that she was contradicting me. For that matter there wasn't anything offensive about her kind of frankness. “No, Hobart. I feel too much at home to have come from any other world than this one.”
Temporarily I was floored. How could she, so ignorant of other matters, feel so sure of this? There was no explaining it.
We went back into the house. As it happened, my eye struck first the gramophone. And it seemed a good idea to test her knowledge with this.
“Is this apparatus familiar to you?”
“No. What is it for?”
“Do you understand what is meant by the term 'music'?”
“Yes,” with instant pleasure. “This is music.” She proceeded, without the slightest self-consciousness, to sing in a sweet clear soprano, and treated us to the chorus of “I Am Climbing Mountains!”
“Good heavens!” gasped Charlotte. “What can it mean?”
For a moment the explanation evaded me. Then I reasoned: “She must have a sub-conscious memory of what was being played just before she materialised.”
And to prove this I picked out an instrumental piece which we had not played all the evening. It was the finale of the overture to “Faust”; a selection, by the way, which was a great favourite of Harry's and is one of mine. Ariadne listened in silence to the end.