ness among you consisted in gaining any possible advantage over the others and in calling each other names. Also in maneuvering bits of money—as much as might be—from unpleasing men who hung about the dingy play-house. On holidays you were invariably half-drunk.'
Said I: 'And wherein was she not petty?'
Said the Soul: 'You believed in yourself. You had not a doubt you belonged in worldly high places but were kept down by the malice and depravity of human nature, people about you. And you lived up to your vulgar ideal of ambition. There was a simplicity, an enlightening pathos in you then which was lacking in the linen-draper's lodger.'
In my flawed way I saw that, but objected to the bygone Liverpool lady from many an angle.
Said I: 'Had I no life of a sweetness and gentleness and with it something that buoyed and bore you on?'
Said the Soul: 'Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read the philosphers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore
