“Yes. At your service.... At the next large family reunion you both will be present, won’t you?”
I said we would try to be, and again he wrote his name, indicating that he had nothing more to say, whereupon I called Mary K., reproached her for inaccuracy, and asked why she had said Mansfield Kendal would come by the Century.
Apparently despairing of penetrating such density, she replied, merely: “He wanted to leave to-day.” Later in the afternoon she said, “He will be perfectly ready to believe,” which seemed to me highly improbable.
Some things written that afternoon came to my mind before they did to my fingers, and I asked whether she could not write the messages without first telling me what they were to be.
“Yes,” she returned, “but it is harder for us and more exhausting for you.” Weeks afterward, when this separate control of mind and pencil had been more fully demonstrated, it was more fully explained.
Remembering her statement that her work took her “on perpetual tour,” I asked how long she would be here.
“I shall be near you for months,” she said, and then began again her never wholly relinquished effort to write the message first attempted two days before. “Ao ... an ... aon ... aem ... aeons ago ...”—here she made a frantic little joy circle—“... we were lovers.”
This surprised me, for it seemed unlike her and was absolutely foreign to my thought, but when she had verified it, I asked: “Is reincarnation true, then?”
“No. Aeons ago ... I was a friend of yours in ——.” She mentioned a person whom I have known all my life. Again this seemed utter nonsense, but again she verified it. “We were concerned in being more and more curiously limited ... more and more animal.” Some of this came readily, some with halting and false starts, which—like Frederick—she crossed out herself.