come alive. I mean, toward making the different kind of
person one sometimes is in a dream the real person when one is awake.
You know how different you seem sometimes when you are asleep, not at
all the same kind of person you are when you are awake. Now, wouldn't
it be interesting if you could make yourself be that person sometimes
after you wake up? It seems to me it would be a delightful change from
being the same person all the time. This being tied fast to yourself
year in and year out gets very monotonous."

Miss Annister gave a little gasp and leaned nearer to him, distress in
her eyes.

"Don't say that!" she begged, hardly above a whisper. "Don't even
think such things! You are you, and I wouldn't have you different for
worlds and worlds!"

Her disturbed little appeal was shielded from observation by a
vivacious feminine voice which called out simultaneously: "Please
finish my house before you turn yourself into anybody else, Mr. Brand!
You know we've only settled on the back porch and one dormer window,
so far, and I'll leave it to these good people if that's enough for a
family of six to live in!"

Henrietta smiled discreetly at her plate, for she knew along what a
tortuous path of inchoate ideas and breezy caprices Mrs. Grahame
Fenlow, upon the sightliness of whose new chauffeur she and her sister
were basing their hopes of keeping their maid of all work, had led the
architect in his attempt to design a new house for her.

"Aren't you afraid, mother," exclaimed Mark Fenlow, from his seat
beside Henrietta, "if you don't decide pretty soon whether you want
that dormer window in the cellar or the roof and whether the back
porch is to be before or behind the house, that Mr. Brand will be
driven to try a new personality, or incarnation, or--or drink, or
whatever you call it!"

"Why, here's the doctor at last," cried Felix Brand as he rose to
greet the newcomer and lead him to his seat at the table.

Dr. Philip Annister, smiling affably at the company, scarcely looked
the famous specialist in nerve diseases that he was. Short and slight
in physique, his head, when he stood beside his handsome wife, was
barely on a level with hers. Wherefore, his shoes, ever since his
wedding day, had been noticeably high of heel, and rarely was he
known to wear other head covering than a silk hat. He had cast aside
the look of abstraction which commonly possessed his thin, pale
countenance and his manner and speech of mod