"So in human life! The body rots; the spirit passes—where?"
He continued with scarcely a moment's pause:
"Down the broad avenues of time, to appear in a thousand different forms and shapes. A king in one age is a serf in another, a savage this century is a scholar in the next. Has there never been a moment in your life when a sense of unreality has seized you? You doubt for a moment your own identity, you are haunted by miragelike thoughts, beautiful, or sad; you are strangely out of touch with your surroundings. Watch a great concourse of people. It is the most fascinating thing in the world.
"You will see a beggar who has now and then some trick of carriage or gesture or speech which has survived his body's degradation, and which reminds you of a king. Or you will see one of the great ones of the earth, if you watch closely enough, do some small thing, or speak some chance word which has crept out unheeded, very likely repeated, yet which could have no kinship with his present state.
"There are people who have visited a strange country for the first time in their lives, and found there a street-corner, a shop, or byway which has awakened a peculiar and inexplicable sense of familiarity. They have never been there before, never read of the place, yet the sense of familiarity is there. I have seen a boy fall asleep, and heard him croon an old Mexican war-song, a song of the time of Cortez and the Incas, in an almost forgotten language—a boy who awake is a messenger at a draper's, unimaginative, ignorant, stupid. The secret of these things will one day be yielded up to science. You and I together may become immortal."
He ended with a little laugh. The fierce eagerness had burned itself out. Of the two, Eleanor was now the more disturbed.
"I should like to know how it feels," she said thoughtfully, "to be without a memory, to start life at twenty-two."
"The things outside your own personal experiences are never lost to you," he said. "They come back in a perfectly effortless manner. You will find yourself accepting them as a matter of course."
"How do you know that?" she asked. "One might have to learn to read and write again. Life without any background at all would become a gigantic embarrassment."
"There is no fear of anything of the sort," he assured her. "Halkar's friend and the girl related to me their own experiences. They were precisely similar. It was of events and persons alone that their mind was swept bare. Their stock of acquired knowledge remained unimpaired. Sometimes they even dimly remembered people."