Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/236

 cleverest child-thief in London.'

It warmed my vanity to think of myself as clever in so theatric a rôle as thief.

Said I: 'How did that life like you?'

Said the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: 'I had little to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter's field before your sixteenth birthday.'

Said I: 'How did the little Thief look?'

Said the Soul: 'You were sufficiently ugly—an undersized form, a gamin face, bastard features.'

Said I: 'And I daresay ignorant?'

Said the Soul: 'Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London slums. And singularly shrewd—what is called philosophical.'

Said I: 'Pray tell me another life.'

Said the Soul: 'An earlier time—Paris, some century before the Terror saw you a slim fille-du-pavè, a prostitute of a low cheap type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you have ever possessed. You had wit, will, esprit, determination. From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you were at thirty a won-