The Price of Things | Page 2

am always thinking."
He smiled indulgently.
"Oh! no, you are not--you only imagine that you are. You have
questioned nothing--you do right generally because you have a nice
character and have been well brought up, not from any conscious
determination to uplift the soul. Yes--is it not so?"
She was startled.
"Perhaps."
"Do you ever ask yourself what things mean? What we are--where we
are going? What is the end of it all? No--you are happy; you live from
day to day--and yet you cannot be a very young ego, your eyes are too
wise--you have had many incarnations. It is merely that in this one life
the note of awakening has not yet been struck. You certainly must have
needed sleep."
"Many lives? You believe in that theory?"
She was not accustomed to discuss unorthodox subjects. She was
interested.
"But of course--how else could there be justice? We draw the reflex of
every evil action and of every good one, but sometimes not until the
next incarnation, that is why the heedless ones cannot grasp the
truth--they see no visible result of either good or evil--evil, in fact,
seems generally to win if there is a balance either way."
"Why are we not allowed memory then, so that we might profit by our
lessons?"

"We should in that case improve from self-interest and not have our
faults eliminated by suffering. We are given no conscious memory of
our last life, so we go on fighting for whatever desire still holds us until
its achievement brings such overwhelming pain that the desire is no
more."
"Why do you say that for happiness we must banish thought--that
seems a paradox."
She was a little disturbed.
"I said if one consciously and deliberately desired happiness, one must
banish thought to bring oneself back to the condition of hundreds of
people who are happy; many of them are even elementals without souls
at all. They are permitted happiness so that they may become so
attached to the earth plane that they willingly return and gradually
obtain a soul. But no one who is allowed to think is allowed any
continued happiness; there would be no progress. If so, we should
remain as brutes."
"Then how cruel of you to suggest to me to think. I want to be
happy--perhaps I do not want to obtain a soul."
"That was born long ago--my words may have awakened it once more,
but the sleep was not deep."
Amaryllis Ardayre looked at the crowds passing and re-passing in those
stately rooms.
"Tell me, who is that woman over there?" she asked. "The very pretty
one with the fair hair in jade green--she looks radiantly happy."
"And is--she is frankly an animal--exquisitely preserved, damnably
selfish, completely devoid of intellect, sugar manners, the senses of a
harem houri--and the tenacity of a rat."
"You are severe."

"Not at all. Harietta Boleski is a product of that most astonishing nation
across the Atlantic--none other could produce her. It is the hothouse of
the world as regards remarkable types. Here for immediate ancestry we
have a mother, from heaven knows what European refuse heap, arrived
in an immigrant ship--father of the 'pore white trash' of the south--result:
Harietta, fine points, beautiful, quite a lady for ordinary purposes. The
absence of soul is strikingly apparent to any ordinary observer, but one
only discovers the vulgarity of spirit if one is a student of evolution--or
chances to catch her when irritated with her modiste or her maid. Other
nations cannot produce such beings. Women with the attributes of
Harietta, were they European, would have surface vulgarity
showing--and so be out of the running, or they would have real passion
which would be their undoing--passion is glorious--it is aroused by
something beyond the physical. Observe her nostril! There is simple,
delightful animal sensuality for you! Look also at the convex curve
below the underlip--she will bite off the cherry whether it is hers by
right or another's, and devour it without a backward thought."
"Boleski--that is a Russian name, is it not?"
"No, Polish--she secured our Stanislass, a great man in his country--last
year in Berlin, having divorced a no longer required, but worthy
German husband who had held some post in the American Consulate
there."
"Is that old man standing obediently beside her your Stanislass?--he
looks quite cowed."
"A sad sight, is it not? Stanislass, though, is not old, barely forty. He
had a _béguin_ for her. She put his intelligence to sleep and
bamboozled his judgment with a continuous appeal to the senses; she
has vampired him now. Cloying all his will with her sugared caprices,
she makes him scenes and so keeps him in subjection. He was one of
the Council de l'Empire for Poland; the aims of his country were his