. Their
intelligence was devoted to matters of the moment; they were keen and
well-finished and accomplished. Hadria used to look at them in
astonishment. How did these quick-witted people manage to escape the
importunate inquisitive demon, the familiar spirit, who pursued her
incessantly with his queries and suggestions? He would stare up from
river and street and merry gardens; his haunting eyes looked mockingly
out of green realms of stirring foliage, and his voice was like a
sardonic echo to the happy voices of the children, laughing at their
play under the flickering shadows, of mothers discussing their cares and
interests, of men in blouses, at work by the water-side, or solemn, in
frock-coats, with pre-occupations of business and bread-winning. The
demon had his own reflections on all these seemingly ordinary matters,
and so bizarre were they at times, so startling and often so terrible,
that one found oneself shivering in full noontide, or smiling, or
thrilled with passionate pity at "the sad, strange ways of men."

It was sweet to stretch one's cramped wings to the sun, to ruffle and
spread them, as a released bird will, but it was startling to find
already little stiff habits arisen, little creaks and hindrances never
suspected, that made flight in the high air not quite effortless and
serene.

The Past is never past; immortal as the Gods, it lives enthroned in the
Present, and sets its limits and lays its commands.

Cases have been known of a man blind from birth being restored to sight,
at mature age. For a time, the appearance of objects was strange and
incomprehensible. Their full meaning was not conveyed to him; they
remained riddles. He could not judge the difference between near and
far, between solid and liquid; he had no experience, dating from
childhood, of the apparent smallness of distant things, of the connexion
between the impression given to the touch by solids and their effect on
the eye. He had all these things to learn. A thousand trifling
associations, of which those with normal senses are scarcely conscious,
had to be stumblingly acquired, as a child learns to connect sound and
sight, in learning to read.

Such were the changes of consciousness that Hadria found herself going
through; only realising each phase of the process after it was over, and
the previous confusion of vision had been itself revealed, by the newly
and often painfully acquired co-ordinating skill.

But, as generall