This was more encouraging. “Why?” he asked, grinning.
“You’re so dense!”
At last he understood, and a great peace filled him. “Sit down,” he said coaxingly. “Let’s be friends. We only have nine days more.”
This took her by surprise. She sat. “Why only nine days?”
“When we get out your life will claim you. This little time will seem like a dream.”
She began to see then, and her heart warmed towards him. “Now I understand what’s the matter with you!” she cried. “You think that I am not myself now; that this me which is talking to you is not the real me, but a kind of—what do they call it?—a kind of changeling. And that when we get back to the world, or some day soon, this me will be whisked away again, and my old self come back and take possession of my body.”
“Something like that,” he said, with a rueful smile.
“Oh, you hurt me when you talk like that!” she cried. “You are wrong, quite, quite wrong! This is my ownest self that speaks to you now; that is—that is your friend, and it will never change! Think a little. What I have lost is not essential. It is only memory. That is to say, the baggage that one gradually collects through life; what was impressed on your mind as a child; what you pick up from watching other people and from reading books; what people tell you you ought to do; outside ideas of every kind, mostly false. Well, I’ve chucked it all—or it has been chucked for me. Such as I am now, I am the woman I was born to be! And I will never change. I don’t care if I never find my lost baggage. My heart is light without it. But if I do it can make no difference. Baggage is only baggage. And having once found your own heart you never could forget that.”
They both instinctively stood up. They did not touch each other.
“Do you still doubt me?” she asked.