 most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as
bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect features
could make it, but even had her countenance lacked special charms, the faultless
luxuriance of her figure would have given her place as a beauty among the women
of the nineteenth century. Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely
creature deliciously combined with an appearance of health and abounding
physical vitality too often lacking in the maidens with whom alone I could
compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in comparison with the general
strangeness of the situation, but still striking, that her name should be Edith.
    The evening that followed was certainly unique in the history of social
intercourse, but to suppose that our conversation was peculiarly strained or
difficult would be a great mistake. I believe indeed that it is under what may
be called unnatural, in the sense of extraordinary, circumstances that people
behave most naturally, for the reason, no doubt, that such circumstances banish
artificiality. I know at any rate that my intercourse that evening with these
representatives of another age and world was marked by an ingenuous sincerity
and frankness such as but rarely crown long acquaintance. No doubt the exquisite
tact of my entertainers had much to do with this. Of course there was nothing we
could talk of but the strange experience by virtue of which I was there, but
they talked of it with an interest so naive and direct in its expression as to
relieve the subject to a great degree of the element of the weird and the
uncanny which might so easily have been overpowering. One would have supposed
that they were quite in the habit of entertaining waifs from another century, so
perfect was their tact.
    For my own part, never do I remember the operations of my mind to have been
more alert and acute than that evening, or my intellectual sensibilities more
keen. Of course I do not mean that the consciousness of my amazing situation was
for a moment out of mind, but its chief effect thus far was to produce a
feverish elation, a sort of mental intoxication.1
    Edith Leete took little part in the conversation, but when several times the
magnetism of her beauty drew my glance to her face, I found her eyes fixed on me
with an absorbed intensity, almost like fascination. It was evident that I had
excited her interest to an extraordinary degree, as was not astonishing,
supposing her to be a girl of imagination. Though I supposed curiosity was the
chief motive of her interest, it could but affect me as it would not have done
had she been less beautiful.
    Dr. Leete,
