e 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 no