“Yes,” she said, in her turn, “I have noticed that. But don’t you sometimes—sometimes”—she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping—“have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?”
“Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”
“But don’t you—don’t you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence—”
She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the experience which young people make much of when they have it, and sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:
“‘For something is, or something seems,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’
These weird impressions are no more than that, probably.”
“Ah, I don’t believe it,” the girl said. “They are too real for that. They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more fully, some time. If there was a life before this—do you believe there was?—they may be things that happened there. Or they may be things that will happen in a life after this. You believe in that, don’t you?”
“In a life after this, or their happening in it?”
“Well, both.”
Lanfear evaded her, partly. “They could be premonitions, prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death.”