Peter Ibbetson

Excerpt: ...yet here was everything as it had been when I was a child; and all through the agency of this solid phantom of a lovely young English duchess, whose warm gloved hands I had only this minute been holding in mine! The scent of her gloves was still in my palm. I looked at my watch; it marked twenty-three minutes to twelve. All this had happened in less than three-quarters of an hour! Pondering over all this in hopeless bewilderment, I turned my steps towards my old home, and, to my surprise, was just able to look over the garden wall, which I had once thought about ten feet high. Under the old apple-tree in full bloom sat my mother, darning small socks; with her flaxen side-curls (as it was her fashion to wear them) half-concealing her face. My emotion and astonishment were immense. My heart beat fast. I felt its pulse in my temples, and my breath was short. At a little green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a gilt-edged volume bound in red morocco. I knew it at a glance; it was Elegant Extracts. The dog Medor lay asleep in the shade. The bees were droning among the nasturtiums and convolvulus. A little girl ran up the avenue from the porter's lodge and pushed the garden gate, which rang the bell as it opened, and she went into the garden, and I followed her; but she took no notice of me, nor did the others. It was Mimsey Seraskier. I went out and sat at my mother's feet, and looked long in her face. I must not speak to her, nor touch her-not even touch her busy hand with my lips, or I should "blur the dream." I got up and looked over the boy Gogo's shoulder. He was translating Gray's Elegy into French; he had not got very far, and seemed to be stumped by the...