She got up from the low chair in which she was sitting with an air of dismissing the subject of their talk.
“Come, ask me some more of those very silly riddles,” she said. “I think they are admirable in laying ghosts. So, too, are you, Mr. Dundas. I am sure you will not resent it when I say it is because you are so frightfully silly. Ghosts cannot stand silliness.”
Evelyn laughed.
“It is so recuperative to be silly,” he said, “because it requires no effort to a person of silly disposition, that is to say. One has to be oneself. How easy!”
She opened her eyes at this.
“That means you find it easy to be natural,” she said. “Why, I should have thought that was almost the most difficult thing in the world to be. Now a pose is easy; it is like acting; you have got to be somebody else. But to be oneself! One has to know what one is, first of all, one has to know what one likes.”
Evelyn laughed again.
“Not at all. You just have to shut your eyes, take a long breath, and begin talking. Whatever you say is you.”
The girl shook her head.
“Ah, you don’t understand,” she said. “You, you, I, everybody, are really all sorts of people put into one envelope. Am I to say what one piece of me is prompting me to say or what another is thinking about? And it’s just the same with one’s actions; one hardly ever does a thing which every part of one wants to do; one’s actions, just like one’s words, are a sort of compromise between the desires of one’s different components.”