“Oh, but you did once,” she said. “It is one of the things you have forgotten.” She laughed. “So many things you had forgotten, but you are remembering them now.”
She laughed again.
“Now you’ll remember how you came to know what a penguin was. On that day—the day of the evening we went to the Monday Pop—we went to the Zoo. It was you who wanted to go there to be alone with me; you considered that the Zoo in that weather would be the most solitary place in London—the hard frost that it was. Colder than this, colder than you are now. You’re thawing a little, you stiff creature....”
She shivered under her cloak.
“We stopped most of the time with the monkeys, but we saw the penguins, too. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t want to. It would not have been like me to call you a penguin. You’re not like one.”
“Ah,” she said, “when you’re in love you don’t bother about likenesses. I’ll bet you called your wife a penguin before you married her, or a tooth-brush, or a puff-ball. I’ve heard that men always transfer their pet names from woman to woman.”
He attempted to blurt out that she was to leave Pauline out of it, but she cried:
“Oh, you traitor! You have called her one of these names. Couldn’t you have kept them sacred? Isn’t anything sacred to a man? I loved you so, and you loved me. And then...”
The memory of their past lives came suddenly over him.