“Yes. I used to glide about on ponds, like this.”
She proceeded to “glide” round and round the corner of the room in which we were sitting. She arched her neck, raised her ponderous legs laboriously and moved about like a pantechnicon. Her face assumed a disagreeable expression and I thought of a rather good line in one of my own poems:
And swans sulked largely on the yellow mere.
“And how much of your previous incarnation do you remember?” I asked, when she had finished sulking largely in the yellow drawing-room.
“Oh, quite a lot. It comes back to me in flashes. I was very lonely—oh, so lonely.”
She gave me a quick look, and I began to talk of William J. Locke, who, a few days previously, had published a new book. Resenting my change of subject, she left me and, a few minutes later, as I was eating a watercress sandwich, I heard her saying to a yellow-haired male:
“You were a horse in your last incarnation.”
I met this lady on other occasions, and always she was occupied in telling men that they had been horses and she a swan—an oh-so-lonely swan.
“Why,” said I to my hostess one day, “don’t Madame X.’s friends look after her? See—she is arching her neck over there in the corner, and I am perfectly certain she has told the man with her that he has been, is, or is going to be a horse.”
For a moment my hostess looked concerned.