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And, then, there was his place in the pages of Vanity Fair to be won. He put that in front of him as his aim in life, and became daily more and more whimsical.

Nevertheless, he did one prosaic thing. He fell in love with Winifred Ames, and could not help showing it. As the malady increased upon him his reputation began to suffer eclipse, for he relapsed into sentiment, and even allowed his eyes to grow large and lover-like. He ceased to worry people, and so began to bore them–a much more dangerous thing. For a moment he even ran the fearful risk of becoming wholly natural, dropping his mask, and showing himself as he really was, a rather dull, quite normal young man, with the usual notions about the usual things, the usual bias towards the usual vices, the usual disinclination to do the usual duties of life.

He ran a risk, but Winifred saved him, and restored him to his fantasies this evening of the ball in Carlton House Terrace.

It was an ordinary ball, and therefore Eustace appeared to receive his guests in fancy dress, wearing a powdered wig and a George IV. Court costume. This absurdity was a mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon’s reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then took her to a scarlet nook, apparently devised to hold only one person, but into which they gently squeezed, not without difficulty.

She gazed at him with her big brown eyes, that were at the same time honest and fanciful. Then she said:

“You have taken an unfair advantage of us all to-night, Mr. Lane.”

“Havel? How?”

“By retreating into the picturesque clothes of another age. All the men here must hate you.”

“No; they only laugh at me.”

She was silent a moment. Then she said:

“What is it in you that makes you enjoy that which the rest of us are afraid of?”

“And that is—-“

“Being laughed at. Laughter, you know, is the great world’s cat-o’-nine-tails. We fear it as little boys fear the birch on a winter’s morning at school.”

Eustace smiled uneasily.

“Do you laugh at me?” he asked.

“I have. You surely don’t mind.”

“No,” he said, with an effort. Then: “Are you laughing to-night?”

“No. You have done an absurd thing, of course, but it happens to be becoming. You look–well, pretty–yes, that’s the word–in your wig. Many men are ugly in their own hair. And, after all, what would life be without its absurdities? Probably you are right to enjoy being laughed at.”

Eustace, who had seriously meditated putting off his mask forever that night, began to change his mind. The sentence, “Many men are ugly in their own hair,” dwelt with him, and he felt fortified in his powdered wig. What if he took it off, and henceforth Winifred found him ugly? Does not the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not buy our fate at the costumier’s?

“Just tell me one thing,” Winifred went on. “Are you natural?”

“Natural?” he hesitated.

“Yes; I think you must be. You’ve got a whimsical nature.”

“I suppose so.” He thought of his journey with his father years ago, and added: “I wish I hadn’t.”

“Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to you.”

“Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow life.”

“What’s that?”

“Real and earnest.”

And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead poet and his own secret psalm.