For four or five years I lived in a flat that was in a street near the little Park Monceau. I was there only for certain days in the week. The flat was not the finest in Paris, but was discreet, and the place generally had a well-valeted look. A distinct drawback was that although one end of my street gave on to the park, I could not enjoy that latter place much, for the gates were closed every evening before midnight—just when I most deeply appreciate walking for exercise and to take the pure air.

One night at the flat I sat in silent contemplation of two blue china cats that crouched upon a white table. I was wondering whether it would be better to pass the time smoking cigarettes or writing sonnets. Another idea was that it might be better to smoke the cigarettes and stare at the painting on the ceiling. Cigarette, sonnet, or stare? The most important thing at such an hour is to have a cigarette ready to hand and lip. It enshrouds all the most material things with scarves of cloud, fine and celestial. It adds something both to the lights and to the dark of the chamber, taking away the hard mathematics of the angles, and by means of a scented magical spell brings to the agitated human spirit a panacea and peace. It brings, too, the land of dreams. On the particular evening I now speak of there was the intention of doing some writing, and yet the desire to do nothing was active and coercive. Put differently, it was an evening that resembled many other similar evenings of the “unlit lamp and ungirt loin.” Evenings that ended with a full ink-well, sheets of dead-white writing paper, and—a large ash-tray full of golden ends of cigarettes, ashes and unused ideas.

Suddenly I was brought back from my “open-eye dreams” by the unexpected ringing of the bell. I raised my head and tried to be positive that on Friday night, the ninth of June, I did not await any one at that hour of the night. A second ring soon came, so I went to the door and drew back the bolt.

When the door was opened I saw a woman waiting. She was wrapped in a sort of mantle, like a travelling cloak, fastened around the throat. Above, the head was poised. I saw that her hair was blond, and that she was young. Beneath the shadow of her tresses gleamed very dark eyes. The face was a trifle teasing in its expression, and rather sensual, the mouth being very red.

“Do you wish me to come in?” she said, inclining her sweet head upon her shoulder.

I drew back, flattened as it were against the wall, suffering from the genuine, the natural astonishment of a man who has to open his door at such an hour to a woman of whom he has not the slightest recollection—a woman, too, who used the intimate form of address, “thou,” in the first phrase she used.

“My dear lady,” I said, with a touch of timidity, as I followed her into my chamber, “spare me any blame. Of course I recognize you clearly, but by some lapse of memory I do not recall your name. Is it not Lucienne or Tototte?”

She smiled a tender, indulgent smile, but, making no reply, unfastened her mantle.

Her robe was of sea-green silk, with an iris pattern. Snared in the low-cut corsage were beautiful breasts, that seemed as though they longed to burst forth—a flow of imprisoned beauty. Clasped around each of the nude, dark arms was a golden snake, with glittering emerald eyes. Around the throat of darkest cream were two rows of pearls—pearls that had meant the loss of many lives.

“If you remember me it is because we have met in the land of dreams, or in some land of the mind, where it seems that dreams come true. I am Callisto, daughter of Lamia. During eighteen hundred years my tomb has had peace. It is in the flowerful fields and woods of Daphne, near to the hills where were the voluptuous dwelling-places of Antioch. But in these days even the tombs have no abiding home. They took me to Paris, and my shadow or spirit followed. For a long time I slept in the icy caves of the Louvre. I should have been there for ever and ever if it had not been for a great and grand pagan, a really holy man, Louis MÉnard. He is the only living man in all this land who knows to-day the signs and symbols of the ancient divinities. Before my tomb he solemnly pronounced the words that of old gave a nightly and transitory life to the unhappy dead! Therefore behold me. For seven hours each night I may go through your miserable city....”

“Oh, child of the older world,” I cried, “how you must see the change the world sorrows under!”

“Yes, and yet no. I find the dwellings dark, the dresses ugly, the sky sorrowful. How oddly you dress for such a climate. I find that life in general is more stupid, and that human beings look much less happy than in the older and more golden days. But if there is one thing that greatly stupefies me, it is to see that you have still so many of the things that I knew of old. What ... in eighteen hundred years have you all made nothing more, nothing new? Is that so really and truly? What I have seen in the houses, the open air, the streets, is that all? Have you not succeeded in finding a new thing? If not, what misery, my friend!”

My attitude of astonishment was my sole reply.

She smiled, the lovely red lips parting over her mother-of-pearl teeth most enchantingly. Then she murmured in explanation—

“See how I am dressed. This was my burial attire. Regard it. In my first lifetime one dressed in wool and silk. In returning to the earth I thought that such things would have passed away even from the memory of man. I imagined that after so many years that the human race would have discovered fabrics to dress in more wonderful than a tissue of sun and silk, more pleasurable to touch than the exquisite tender skin of young virgins, of rose-leaves, of downy peaches. But you still dress or clothe yourselves in thread, in wool, in the silk we all had of old. Then look at my shoes of olive morocco, worked with gold like the binding of a rare book. Have you as lovely things for the feet in these days? And so with the gems and jewels of these days. I knew them all, then.”

“Callisto,” at last I said, “you give these things too great an importance. A girl is never so beautiful as when she is made as the gods made her.”

She gazed at me, then said very slowly, “Are you sure now that women themselves, their form, has not changed since my early days of life?”