?
They may be all but so many reminiscences of a former birth.

The _Substance of a Dream_ is half a love-story, and half a fairy
tale: as indeed every love-story is a fairy tale. Because, although
that unaccountable mystery, the mutual attraction of the sexes, is the
very essence of life, and everything else merely accidental or
accessory, yet only too often in the jostle of the world, in the
trough and tossing of the waves of time, the accidental smothers the
essential, and life turns into a commonplace instead of a romance. And
so, like every other story, this little story will perhaps be very
differently judged, according to the reader's sex. The bearded critic
will see it with eyes very different from those with which it may be
viewed by the fair voter with no beard upon her chin; for women, as
the great god says at the end, have scant mercy on their own sex, and
the heroine of the story is a strange heroine, an enigmatical Mona
Lisa, so to say, who will not appeal to everybody so strongly as she
does to the Moony-crested Deity, when he sums her up at the close. I
venture, with humility, to concur in the opinion of the Deity, for she
holds me under the same spell as her innumerable other lovers. The
reader, a more formidable authority even than the god, must decide:
only I must warn him that to understand, he must go to the very end.
He will not think his time wasted, if he take half the delight in
reading, as I did, in transcribing, the evidence in the case. Only,
moreover, when he closes the book will he appreciate the mingled
exactitude and beauty of its name: for no story ever had a name which
fitted it with such curious precision as this one. For the essence of
a dream is always that along with its weird beauty, it counters
expectation, often in such queer, ludicrous, kaleidoscopic ways. So it
is, here.

* * * * *

Many bitter things, since the beginning, have men said of women,
though neither so many nor so bitter, as the witty Frenchman cynically
remarks, as the things women have said of one another. Poor Eve has
paid very dear for that apple: the only wonder is, that she was not
made responsible also for the Flood: but we have not got the whole of
that story: Noah's wife may have dropped some incriminating documents
into the water, for the Higher Criticism to unearth by and by: the
Eternal Feminine may have had a hand in it after all, as she is
generally to be found somewh