Said the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: ‘I had little to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter’s field before your sixteenth birthday.’
Said I: ‘How did the little Thief look?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were sufficiently ugly—an undersized form, a gamin face, bastard features.’
Said I: ‘And I daresay ignorant?’
Said the Soul: ‘Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London slums. And singularly shrewd—what is called philosophical.’
Said I: ‘Pray tell me another life.’
Said the Soul: ‘An earlier time—Paris, some century before the Terror saw you a slim fille-du-pavè, a prostitute of a low cheap type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you have ever possessed. You had wit, will, esprit, determination. From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you were at thirty a wonderfully grand courtesan: no better in what are called morals but possessed of very much inner and outer strength and luster. You were chère-aimèe to men of brain, men of importance to the state, whose acts were shaded by your influence. And you achieved unusual wealth chiefly by the powers and strategies of your character. You lived in the extreme of luxury of that time and of your type—a delicate luxury, almost high-bred. You were wanton in amour, being physically extremely passionate, but admirably straightforward and strong in each matter and aspect of your life.’
Said I: ‘You admired her?’
Said the Soul: ‘I was serene and vividly alive within you. You were in all ways, simply and completely, an honest woman, and for the only time.’
Said I: ‘How could she be honest, since she lived by exchanging treasure of much personal economic value for cheap cheapest gold, trash, and a besmirched name: and all through two sorts of greed?’