So she slept, and the sleep was long in the eyes of the children of Time.
When she awoke, memory was gone, and everything had to be learned over again. At first her consciousness was very dim, and her strength feeble, and having slept so long she could scarcely keep awake at all.
But after a time a faint memory of the past came to her, and she saw that all was different from that other time, which now seemed like a dream. This was not the same world, nor were these the same people she had known, for she was in the sad world she had seen in visions, whose people so persistently and often frantically sought Happiness and never found it—and that sad world was this in which we live.
She was changed in appearance, too, for when she looked in a mirror she saw a face that was new to her and a tiny figure. She was like a child, and everybody called her a child, though to herself she seemed not to be a child, because part of her memory had come back, and it was the memory of a woman.
It was very hard to feel like a full-grown person in mind and be treated like a creature with almost no mind at all. One of the most painful things she saw was that sometimes the most ignorant and unfeeling were in positions of power over sensitive children. She suffered much from the very beginning of consciousness.
To go back to the world she could so dimly remember was her one dream. But when she spoke of it those about her laughed and said she had never been in any other world, because there was no other.
Once in a dream she went back, or perhaps it was that some of her old friends came to her. They told her to be patient; that she had been sent to help the unhappy ones who had so often called to her; that scattered all over the planet in which she dwelt now were others like herself, who had come for the same purpose; that she would meet them from time to time and that would pay her for much of her pain.
They said, too, that she had a particular work to do here and could not leave until it was done, but she must find out what it was herself; that the road would often seem very hard and very long, but it had an end, and if she did her work well—
There the dream ended; but it comforted her, all unfinished as it was.
By and by her childhood was gone. She was a woman, and went forth to find her work, earnest, enthusiastic and eager, and they said she had precious gifts.