t idea!" Adrian had been speaking seriously, but at
this point his whimsical mood seized him. He went on:--"You don't mean
to say, I hope, that you are going to make meaning a _sine qua non_ in
theories? It would be the death-knell of speculation."

"You don't know what a goose you are engaged to, Gwen," said Irene
parenthetically.

"Yes, I do. But he meant something this time. He _does_, you know, now
and again, in spite of appearances to the contrary. What _did_ you mean,
please?"

"I can only conjecture," said Adrian incorrigibly. Then, more in
earnest:--"I think it was something like this. I know that I am the same
man that I was last week so long as I remember what happened last week.
Suppose I forget half--which I do, in practice--I still remain the same
man, according to my notion of identity. But it is an academical
notion, of no use in everyday life. A conjurer who forgets how to
lay eggs in defiance of natural law, or how to find canaries in
pocket-handkerchiefs, is not the same conjurer, in practical politics.
And yet he is the same man. Dock and crop his qualities and attributes
as you will, he keeps the same man, academically. But not for working
purposes. By the time you can say nothing about him, that was true of
him last week, he may just as well be somebody else."

"Mind you recollect all that, and it will do in a book," said his
sister. "But what has it to do with Gwen's old woman?"

"Yes--what has it to do with my old woman?" said Gwen.

"Didn't you say," Adrian asked, "that the old lady told all about her
past quite quietly, just as if she had been speaking of somebody else?
Your very expression, ma'am! You see, she was to all intents and
purposes somebody else then, or has become somebody else now. I always
wonder, whether, if one had left oneself--one of one's selves--behind
in the past, like old Mrs. Picture, and some strange navigation on the
sea of life were to land one in a long-forgotten port, where the memory
still hung on, in a mind or two, of the self one had left behind--would
the self one had grown to be bring conviction to the mind or two?
Wouldn't the chance survivors who admitted that you were Jack or Jim or
Polly be discouraged if they found that Jack or Jim or Polly had
forgotten the old pier that was swept away, or the old pub which the new
hotel was, once. Wouldn't they discredit you? Wouldn't they decide that,
for all your bald, uninteresting identity--mere mechanical samene