looking on at a murderous night scene with interest, carefully protecting the child from contact with the throngs.'
Said I: 'How long did that life last?'
Said the Soul: 'Four years after that your sister changed from her bare little bed to a coffin and you went on alone achingly suffering her loss for long years. You lived to be seventy, a thin old woman, working latterly as one of the night nurses in a public hospital. You lived an abstemious outwardly self-sacrificing life and died alone, from hardened arteries, one autumn night.'
Said I: 'And was there an informing beauty for you, for you and for me, in my life then?'
Coldly said the Soul: 'You were self-centered, for all your self-sacrifice. You reckoned it your duty to care for your sister. It was also your irresistible delight. And after her death you took self-satisfaction in self-sacrifice: smug—smug. For me there was a laming distortion in it all.'
Said I: 'Tell me some other life.'
Said the Soul: 'You were once a little thief in the streets of a later London. You picked pockets, you stole bits of food in Covent Garden market, you pilfered shop-tills, you systematically worked the wealthy throngs as they came from the Opera at midnight. You were known to the police as the
