“What on earth are you spouting, Olive Ralston?” Jean demanded; “or tell us, please, if you are composing an essay on the spur of the moment to impress your English teacher?”
Jessica laughed. “Ignorant child, not to know what Olive is repeating! I should have taught it you before now, but Olive seems to have gotten ahead of me and learned it first.”
“But what is it?” Jean insisted. “The idea of Olive’s memorizing a thing like that and then waiting for a critical minute to recite it so as to impress her audience. I never should have suspected her!”
But as Olive made no answer to her friend’s teasing, Jessica said in explanation: “Why, Olive has just recited Washington Irving’s description of this countryside, which he gives in his ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ and when you get back to school, Jean, I advise you to ask Olive to lend you her book.”
Downstairs the little party broke up and on the way back to Primrose Hall, Olive walked close beside Miss Winthrop. At first both the woman and the girl were silent, but as they neared the school Olive spoke suddenly:
“Miss Winthrop, I suppose most everybody in the world knows the feeling of coming to a strange place and all at once thinking that you have been there before, seen the same things or people and even heard the same words said?”
Miss Winthrop nodded, trying to study Olive’s face closely and yet not appearing too deeply interested, although the girl’s expression was both puzzled and intent.
“Why, yes, Olive, it is a very usual experience,” she answered. “No one can understand or explain it very well, but the impression is more apt to come to you when you are young. I can recall once having gone into a ballroom and there having had some one make a perfectly ordinary speech to me and yet I had a sudden sensation almost of faintness, so sure was I that at some past time I had been in the same place, under the same circumstances and heard the same speech, and yet I knew at the time it was impossible.”
“But can one remember actual words that may have been spoken in a certain place? I don’t see how a thing can suddenly pop into one’s mind without our remembering where we have learned it before,” Olive persisted.
Miss Winthrop took the girl’s hand in hers. “My dear,” she said quietly, “I think there are many wonderful things in the world around us that we do not believe in because we do not yet understand them, just as long years ago men and women did not believe that our world was round because it had not then been revealed to them. And so I do not understand about these strange psychical experiences about which we have just been talking. But I recall a remarkable book by Du Maurier, one of the most remarkable novels I have ever read, called ‘Peter Ibbetson.’ In this story there is a song whose refrain is ever repeated in the hero’s mind from the time he is a little boy all through his life. He does not understand why he remembers this song, but by and by it is explained to the reader that this song had played an important part in the life of one of Peter Ibbetson’s ancestors. And just as we can inherit the color of our eyes, the shape of our nose, a queer trait of character from some far-off ancestor, so Du Maurier wrote that we might inherit some mental impression, like the lines of this song. It is a difficult thing to understand, but the idea is interesting.”