"That is possible enough."
"Yet," he continued, "the revival is imperfect--needs confirmation, partakes so much of the dim character of a dream, or of the airy one of a fancy, that the testimony of a witness becomes necessary for corroboration. Were you not a guest at Bretton ten years ago, when Mr. Home brought his little girl, whom we then called 'little Polly,' to stay with mamma?"
"I was there the night she came, and also the morning she went away."
"Rather a peculiar child, was she not? I wonder how I treated her. Was I fond of children in those days? Was there anything gracious or kindly about me--great, reckless, schoolboy as I was? But you don't recollect me, of course?"
"You have seen your own picture at La Terrasse. It is like you personally. In manner, you were almost the same yesterday as to-day."
"But, Lucy, how is that? Such an oracle really whets my curiosity. What am I to-day? What was I the yesterday of ten years back?"
"Gracious to whatever pleased you--unkindly or cruel to nothing."
"There you are wrong; I think I was almost a brute to you, for instance."
"A brute! No, Graham: I should never have patiently endured brutality."
"This, however, I do remember: quiet Lucy Snowe tasted nothing of my grace."
"As little of your cruelty."
"Why, had I been Nero himself, I could not have tormented a being inoffensive as a shadow."
I smiled; but I also hushed a groan. Oh!--I just wished he would let me alone--cease allusion to me. These epithets--these attributes I put from me. His "quiet Lucy Snowe," his "inoffensive shadow," I gave him back; not with scorn, but with extreme weariness: theirs was the coldness and the pressure of lead; let him whelm me with no such weight. Happily, he was soon on another theme.
"On what terms were 'little Polly' and I? Unless my recollections deceive me, we were not foes--"
"You speak very vaguely. Do you think little Polly's memory, not more definite?"
"Oh! we don't talk of 'little Polly' now. Pray say, Miss de Bassompierre; and, of course, such a stately personage remembers nothing of Bretton. Look at her large eyes, Lucy; can they read a word in the page of memory? Are they the same which I used to direct to a horn-book? She does not know that I partly taught her to read."
"In the Bible on Sunday nights?"
"She has a calm, delicate, rather fine profile now: once what a little restless, anxious countenance was hers! What a thing is a child's preference--what a bubble! Would you believe it? that lady was fond of me!"