contentment. He found
himself speculating on the peculiar quality of personality, that
strange thing which makes an individual something apart from others of
his kind, that gift which singles out a girl of ordinary appearance and
leaves one of flawless beauty still wagging her pretty head in the
front row of the chorus. From that point he began to speculate on the
loneliness of personality, which so often robs its owner of the cheery
companionship of commonplace people.

On the whole, he regretted that he was going to see her again so soon.
Her pertness, which had seemed fairly clever the previous night, would
probably descend to triteness in the morning; he could even see her
endeavouring to keep up the same exchange of short sentences. Bah! It
was like a duel with toothpicks. The stolid respectability of Berners
Street lent its aid to the conviction that the morning would hold
nothing but anti-climax.

And he was poet enough to prefer an unfinished sonnet to one with an
inartistic ending.

II.

Austin Selwyn was twenty-six--an age which has something in common with
almost every one of the seven celebrated by Shakespeare. Like most men
in their twenties, he had the character of a chameleon, and adapted
himself to his surroundings with almost uncanny facility. At college
he had been an ardent member of a dozen cliques, even falling under the
egotism of the men who dabbled in Spiritualism, but a clarity of
thought and a strain of Dutch ancestry kept his feet on the earth when
the rest of him showed signs of soaring.

Some moderate wit had said of him at college that he was himself only
twice a day--when he got up in the morning and when he went to bed at
night. This Stevensonian theory was not quite true, for a chameleon
does not cease to be a chameleon because it changes its colour.

It was perhaps his susceptibility to the many vintages of existence
that had impelled him to write, authors being more or less a natural
result of the economic law of intake and output. As is the habit of
most young writers, he wrote on various subjects, put enough material
for a two-volume novel into a short story, and generally revelled in
the prodigality of literary youth. He was prepared to be a social
satirist, a chronicler of the Smart Set, a champion of the down-trodden
masses, or a commercial essayist, according to the first public that
showed appreciation of his work.

Although he had lived in Boston, that cit