know what you mean."

"Oh. Then it wasn't. You're a funny little girl, aren't you?"

"Yes, rather."

"On purpose?"

"Yes, sometimes."

He looked into her very clear eyes, now brightly blue with intelligent
perception of his not too civil badinage.

"And sometimes," he went on, "you're funny when you don't intend to be."

"You are, too, Mr. Drene."

"What?"

"Didn't you know it?"

A dull color tinted his cheek bones.

"No," he said, "I didn't know it."

"But you are. For instance, you don't walk; you stalk. You do what
novelists make their gloomy heroes do--you stride. It's rather funny."

"Really. And do you find my movements comic?"

She was a trifle scared, now, but she laughed her breathless, youthful
laugh:

"You are really very dramatic--a perfect story-book man. But, you know,
sometimes they are funny when the author doesn't intend them to be....
Please don't be angry."

Why the impudence of a model should have irritated him he was at a
loss to understand--unless there lurked under that impudence a trace of
unflattering truth.

As he sat looking at her, all at once, and in an unexpected flash of
self-illumination, he realized that habit had made of him an actor; that
for a while--a long while--a space of time he could not at the moment
conveniently compute--he had been playing a role merely because he had
become accustomed to it.

Disaster had cast him for a part. For a long while he had been that
part. Now he was still playing it from sheer force of habit. His tragedy
had really become only the shadow of a memory. Already he had emerged
from that shadow into the everyday outer world. But he had forgotten
that he still wore a somber makeup and costume which in the sunshine
might appear grotesque. No wonder the world thought him funny.

Glancing up from a perplexed and chagrined meditation he caught her
eye--and found it penitent, troubled, and anxious.

"You're quite right," he said, smiling easily and naturally; "I am
unintentionally funny. And I really didn't know it--didn't suspect
it--until this moment."

"Oh," she said quickly. "I didn't mean--I know you are often unhappy--"

"Nonsense!"

"You are! Anybody can see--and you really do not seem to be very old,
either--when you smile--"

"I'm not very old," he said, amused. "I'm not unhappy, either. If I ever
was, the truth is that I've almost forgotten by this time what it was
all about--"

"A woman," she quoted, "between frie