"What a queer story!" said Adrian. "Did the old body cry when she told it?"
"Scarcely, if at all. She looked very beautiful—you've no idea how lovely she is sometimes—and told it all quite quietly, just as if she had been speaking of someone else."
"I have always had a theory," said Adrian, "that one gets less and less identical, as Time goes on...."
"What do you mean by that?" said Gwen.
"Haven't the slightest idea!" Adrian had been speaking seriously, but at this point his whimsical mood seized him. He went on:—"You don't mean to say, I hope, that you are going to make meaning a sine qua non in theories? It would be the death-knell of speculation."
"You don't know what a goose you are engaged to, Gwen," said Irene parenthetically.
"Yes, I do. But he meant something this time. He does, you know, now and again, in spite of appearances to the contrary. What did you mean, please?"
"I can only conjecture," said Adrian incorrigibly. Then, more in earnest:—"I think it was something like this. I know that I am the same man that I was last week so long as I remember what happened last week. Suppose I forget half—which I do, in practice—I still remain the same man, according to my notion of identity. But it is an academical notion, of no use in everyday life. A conjurer who forgets how to lay eggs in defiance of natural law, or how to find canaries in pocket-handkerchiefs, is not the same conjurer, in practical politics. And yet he is the same man. Dock and crop his qualities and attributes as you will, he keeps the same man, academically. But not for working purposes. By the time you can say nothing about him, that was true of him last week, he may just as well be somebody else."
"Mind you recollect all that, and it will do in a book," said his sister. "But what has it to do with Gwen's old woman?"
"Yes—what has it to do with my old woman?" said Gwen.