"And then and there," said Mrs. Bunting, when she told the story to my cousin Melville, "the poor child burst into tears and confessed she had been born ages and ages ago in some dreadful miraculous way in some terrible place near Cyprus, and had no more right to a surname-- Well, _there_--!" said Mrs. Bunting, telling the story to my cousin Melville and making the characteristic gesture with which she always passed over and disowned any indelicacy to which her thoughts might have tended. "And all the while speaking with such a nice accent and moving in such a ladylike way!"
"Of course," said my cousin Melville, "there are classes of people in whom one excuses-- One must weigh----"
"Precisely," said Mrs. Bunting. "And you see it seems she deliberately chose _me_ as the very sort of person she had always wanted to appeal to. It wasn't as if she came to us haphazard--she picked us out. She had been swimming round the coast watching people day after day, she said, for quite a long time, and she said when she saw my face, watching the girls bathe--you know how funny girls are," said Mrs. Bunting, with a little deprecatory laugh, and all the while with a moisture of emotion in her kindly eyes. "She took quite a violent fancy to me from the very first."
"I can _quite_ believe _that_, at any rate," said my cousin Melville with unction. I know he did, although he always leaves it out of the story when he tells it to me. But then he forgets that I have had the occasional privilege of making a third party in these good long talks.
"You know it's most extraordinary and exactly like the German story," said Mrs. Bunting. "Oom--what is it?"
"Exactly--yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal, Mr. Melville--at least within limits--creatures born of the elements and resolved into the elements again--and just as it is in the story--there's always a something--they have no Souls! No Souls at all! Nothing! And the poor child feels it. She feels it dreadfully. But in order to _get_ souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to come into the world of men. At least so they believe down there. And so she has come to Folkestone. To get a soul. Of course that's her great object, Mr. Melville, but she's not at all fanatical or silly about it. Any more than _we_ are. Of course _we_--people who feel deeply----"