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“Eustace! Eustace! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, father.”

“Then what have you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir–d’you hear me?–like a buffoon!”

“Yes, father.”

“What the deuce do you mean by ‘yes,’ sir?”

Eustace considered, while Mr. Lane puffed in the approved paternal fashion What did he mean? A sudden thought struck him. He became confidential. With an earnest gaze, he said:

“I couldn’t help doing what I did. I want to be like the other fellows, but somehow I can’t. Something inside of me won’t let me just go on as they do. I don’t know why it is, but I feel as if I must do original things–things other people never do; it–it seems in me.”

Mr. Lane regarded him suspiciously, but Eustace had clear eyes, and knew, at least, how to look innocent.

“We shall have to knock it out of you,” blustered the father.

“I wish you could, father,” the boy said. “I know I hate it.”

Mr. Lane began to be really puzzled. There was something pathetic in the words, and especially in the way they were spoken. He stared at Eustace meditatively.

“So you hate it, do you?” he said rather limply at last. “Well, that’s a step in the right direction, at any rate. Perhaps things might have been worse.”

Eustace did not assent.

“They were bad enough,” he said, with a simulation of shame. “I know I’ve been a fool.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Lane said, whirling, as paternal weathercocks will, to another point of the compass, “never mind, my boy. Cheer up! You see your fault–that’s the main thing. What’s done can’t be undone.”

“No, thank heaven!” thought the boy, feeling almost great.

How delicious is the irrevocable past–sometimes!

“Be more careful in future. Don’t let your boyish desire for follies carry you away.”

“I shall,” was his son’s mental rejoinder.

“And I dare say you’ll do good work in the world yet.”

The train ran into Paddington Station on this sublime climax of fatherhood, and the further words of wisdom were jerked out of Mr. Lane during their passage to Carlton House Terrace in a four-wheeled cab.

*****

“What an extraordinary person Mr. Eustace Lane is!” said Winifred Ames to her particular friend and happy foil, Jane Fraser. “All London is beginning to talk about him. I suppose he must be clever?”

“Oh, of course, darling, very clever; otherwise, how could he possibly gain so much notice? Just think–why, there are millions of people in London, and I’m sure only about a thousand of them, at most, attract any real attention. I think Mr. Eustace Lane is a genius.”

“Do you really, Jenny?”

“I do indeed.”

Winifred mused for a moment. Then she said:

“It must be very interesting to marry a genius, I suppose?”

“Oh, enthralling, simply. And, then, so few people can do it.”

“Yes.”

“And it must be grand to do what hardly anybody can do.”

“In the way of marrying, Jenny?”

“In any way,” responded Miss Fraser, who was an enthusiast, and habitually sentimental. “What would I give to do even one unique thing, or to marry even one unique person!”

“You couldn’t marry two at the same time–in England.”

“England limits itself so terribly; but there is a broader time coming. Those who see it, and act upon what they see, are pioneers; Mr. Lane is a pioneer.”

“But don’t you think him rather extravagant?”

“Oh yes. That is so splendid. I love the extravagance of genius, the barbaric lavishness of moral and intellectual supremacy.”

“I wonder whether the supremacy of Eustace Lane is moral, or intellectual, or–neither?” said Winifred. “There are so many different supremacies, aren’t there? I suppose a man might be supreme merely as a–as a–well, an absurdity, you know.”

Jenny smiled the watery smile of the sentimentalist; a glass of still lemonade washed with limelight might resemble it.

“Eustace Lane likes you, Winnie,” she remarked.

“I know; that is why I am wondering about him. One does wonder, you see, about the man one may possibly be going to marry.”