Perhaps she was the very same, perpetuated across the centuries, through extraordinary incarnations.

In that moment Ulysses would have believed anything possible.
Besides he was very little concerned with the reasonableness of things just now; the important thing to him was that they should exist; and Freya was at his side; Freya and that other one, welded into one and the same woman, clad like the Grecian sovereign.
Again he repeated the sweet name that had illuminated his infancy with romantic splendor.

"Dona Constanza! Oh, Dona Constanza!..." And night overwhelmed him, cuddling his pillow as when he was a child, and falling asleep enraptured with thoughts of the young widow of "Vatacio the Heretic." When he met Freya again the next day, he felt attracted by a new force,--the redoubled interest that people in dreams inspire.

She might really be the empress resuscitated in a new form as in the books of chivalry, or she might simply be the wandering widow of a learned sage,--for the sailor it was all the same thing.

He desired her, and to his carnal desire was added others less material,--the necessity of seeing her for the mere pleasure of seeing her, of hearing her, of suffering her negatives, of being repelled in all his advances.
She had pleasant memories of the expedition to the heights of S.
Martino.
"You must have thought me ridiculous because of my sensitiveness and my tears.