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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Folly Of Eustace, by Robert S. Hichens
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Folly Of Eustace
+       1896
+
+Author: Robert S. Hichens
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23420]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FOLLY OF EUSTACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FOLLY OF EUSTACE.
+
+By R. S. Hichens
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Some men deliberately don a character in early youth as others don a
+mask before going to an opera ball. They select it not without some
+care, being guided in their choice by the opinion they have formed
+of the world's mind and manner of proceeding. In the privacy of the
+dressing-room, the candles being lighted and the mirror adjusted at the
+best angle for a view of self, they assume their character, and peacock
+to their reflection, meditating: Does it become me? Will it be generally
+liked? Will it advance me towards my heart's desire? Then they catch up
+their cloak, twist the mirror back to its usual position, puff out the
+candles, and steal forth into their career, shutting the door gently
+behind them. And, perhaps till they are laid out in the grave, the
+last four walls enclosing them, only the dressing-room could tell their
+secret. And it has no voice to speak. For, if they are wise, they do not
+keep a valet.
+
+At the age of sixteen Eustace Lane chose his mask, lit the candles,
+tried it on, and resolved to wear it at the great masquerade. He was
+an Eton boy at the time. One fourth of June he was out in the
+playing-fields, paying polite attentions to another fellow's sister,
+when he overheard a fragment of a conversation that was taking place
+between his mother and one of the masters. His mother was a kind
+Englishwoman, who was very short-sighted, and always did her duty.
+The master was a fool, but as he was tall, handsome, and extremely
+good-natured, Eustace Lane and most people considered him to be highly
+intelligent. Eustace caught the sound of his name pronounced. The fond
+mother, in the course of discreet conversation, had proceeded from the
+state of the weather to the state of her boy's soul, taking, with
+the ease of the mediocre, the one step between the sublime and the
+ridiculous. She had told the master the state of the weather--which, for
+once, was sublime; she wanted him, in return, to tell her the state of
+her boy's soul--which was ridiculous.
+
+Eustace forgot the other fellow's sister, her limpid eyes, her
+open-worked stockings, her panoply of chiffons and of charms. He
+had heard his own name. Bang went the door on the rest of the world,
+shutting out even feminine humanity. Self-consciousness held him
+listening. His mother said:
+
+"Dear Eustace! What do you think of him, Mr. Bembridge? Is he _really_
+clever? His father and I consider him unusually intelligent for his
+age--so advanced in mind. He judges for himself, you know. He always
+did, even as a baby. I remember when he was quite a tiny mite I could
+always trust to his perceptions. In my choice of nurses I was invariably
+guided by him. If he screamed at them I felt that there was something
+wrong, and dismissed them--of course with a character. If he smiled at
+them, I knew I could have confidence in their virtue. How strange these
+things are! What is it in us that screams at evil and smiles at good?"
+
+"Ah! what, indeed?" replied the master, accepting her conclusion as an
+established and very beautiful fact. "There is more in the human heart
+than you and I can fathom, Mrs. Lane."
+
+"Yes, indeed! But tell me about Eustace. You have observed him?"
+
+"Carefully. He is a strange boy."
+
+"Strange?"
+
+"Whimsical, I mean. How clever he may be I am unable to say. He is so
+young, and, of course, undeveloped. But he is an original. Even if he
+never displays great talents the world will talk about him."
+
+"Why?" asked Mrs. Lane in some alarm.
+
+To be talked about was, she considered, to be the prey of
+scandalmongers. She did not wish to give her darling to the lions.
+
+"I mean that Eustace has a strain of quaint fun in him--a sort of
+passion for the burlesque of life. You do not often find this in boys.
+It is new to my experience. He sees the peculiar side of everything with
+a curious acuteness. Life presents itself to him in caricature. I------
+Well hit! Well hit indeed!"
+
+Someone had scored a four.
+
+The other fellow's sister insisted on moving to a place whence they
+could see the cricket better, and Eustace had to yield to her. But from
+that moment he took no more interest in her artless remarks and her
+artful open-worked stockings. In the combat between self and her she
+went to the wall. He stood up before the mirror looking steadfastly at
+his own image.
+
+And, finding it not quite so interestingly curious as the fool of a
+master had declared it to be, he lit some more candies, selected a mask,
+and put it on.
+
+He chose the mask of a buffoon.
+
+*****
+
+From that day Eustace strove consistently to live up to the reputation
+given to him by a fool, who had been talking at random to please an avid
+mother. Mr. Bembridge knew that the boy was no good at work, wanted
+to say something nice about him, and had once noticed him playing
+some absurd but very ordinary boyish prank. On this supposed hint of
+character the master spoke. Mrs. Lane listened. Eustace acted. A sudden
+ambition stirred within him. To be known, talked about, considered,
+perhaps even wondered at--was not that a glory? Such a glory came to the
+greatly talented--to the mightily industrious. Men earned it by labour,
+by intensity, insensibility to fatigue, the "roughing it" of the mind.
+He did not want to rough it. Nor was he greatly talented. But he was
+just sharp enough to see, as he believed, a short and perhaps easy way
+to a thing that his conceit desired and that his egoism felt it could
+love. Being only a boy, he had never, till this time, deliberately
+looked on life as anything. Now he set himself, in his, at first,
+youthful way, to look on it as burlesque--to see it in caricature.
+How to do that? He studied the cartoons in _Vanity Fair_, the wondrous
+noses, the astounding trousers, that delight the cynical world. Were men
+indeed like these? Did they assume such postures, stare with such eyes,
+revel in such complexions? These were the celebrities of the time.
+They all looked with one accord preposterous. Eustace jumped to the
+conclusion that they were what they looked, and, going a step farther,
+that they were celebrated because they were preposterous. Gifted with
+a certain amount of imagination, this idea of the interest, almost the
+beauty of the preposterous, took a firm hold of his mind. One day he,
+too, would be in _Vanity Fair_, displaying terrific boots, amazing thin
+legs, a fatuous or a frenetic countenance to the great world of the
+unknown. He would stand out from the multitude if only by virtue of an
+unusual eyeglass, a particular glove, the fashion of his tie or of his
+temper. He would balance on the ball of peculiarity, and toe his way
+up the spiral of fame, while the music-hall audience applauded and the
+managers consulted as to the increase of his salary. Mr. Bembridge had
+shown him a weapon with which he might fight his way quickly to the
+front. He picked it up and resolved to use it. Soon he began to slash
+out right and left. His blade chanced to encounter the outraged body of
+an elderly and sardonic master. Eustace was advised that he had better
+leave Eton. His father came down by train and took him away.
+
+As they journeyed up to town, Mr. Lane lectured and exhorted, and
+Eustace looked out of the window. Already he felt himself near to being
+a celebrity. He had astonished Eton. That was a good beginning. Papa
+might prose, knowing, of course, nothing of the poetry of caricature,
+of the wild joys and the laurels that crown the whimsical. So while Mr.
+Lane hunted adjectives, and ran sad-sounding and damnatory substantives
+to earth, Eustace hugged himself, and secretly chuckled over his
+pilgrim's progress towards the pages of _Vanity Fair_.
+
+"Eustace! Eustace! Are you listening to me?"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"Then what have you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your
+conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir--d'you hear me?--like a
+buffoon!"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"What the deuce do you mean by 'yes,' sir?"
+
+Eustace considered, while Mr. Lane puffed in the approved paternal
+fashion What did he mean? A sudden thought struck him. He became
+confidential. With an earnest gaze, he said:
+
+"I couldn't help doing what I did. I want to be like the other fellows,
+but somehow I can't. Something inside of me won't let me just go on as
+they do. I don't know why it is, but I feel as if I must do original
+things--things other people never do; it--it seems in me."
+
+Mr. Lane regarded him suspiciously, but Eustace had clear eyes, and
+knew, at least, how to look innocent.
+
+"We shall have to knock it out of you," blustered the father.
+
+"I wish you could, father," the boy said. "I know I hate it."
+
+Mr. Lane began to be really puzzled. There was something pathetic in the
+words, and especially in the way they were spoken. He stared at Eustace
+meditatively.
+
+"So you hate it, do you?" he said rather limply at last. "Well, that's a
+step in the right direction, at any rate. Perhaps things might have been
+worse."
+
+Eustace did not assent.
+
+"They were bad enough," he said, with a simulation of shame. "I know
+I've been a fool."
+
+"Well, well," Mr. Lane said, whirling, as paternal weathercocks will,
+to another point of the compass, "never mind, my boy. Cheer up! You see
+your fault--that's the main thing. What's done can't be undone."
+
+"No, thank heaven!" thought the boy, feeling almost great.
+
+How delicious is the irrevocable past--sometimes!
+
+"Be more careful in future. Don't let your boyish desire for follies
+carry you away."
+
+"I shall," was his son's mental rejoinder.
+
+"And I dare say you'll do good work in the world yet."
+
+The train ran into Paddington Station on this sublime climax of
+fatherhood, and the further words of wisdom were jerked out of Mr. Lane
+during their passage to Carlton House Terrace in a four-wheeled cab.
+
+*****
+
+"What an extraordinary person Mr. Eustace Lane is!" said Winifred Ames
+to her particular friend and happy foil, Jane Fraser. "All London is
+beginning to talk about him. I suppose he must be clever?"
+
+"Oh, of course, darling, very clever; otherwise, how could he possibly
+gain so much notice? Just think--why, there are millions of people in
+London, and I'm sure only about a thousand of them, at most, attract any
+real attention. I think Mr. Eustace Lane is a genius."
+
+"Do you really, Jenny?"
+
+"I do indeed."
+
+Winifred mused for a moment. Then she said:
+
+"It must be very interesting to marry a genius, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, enthralling, simply. And, then, so few people can do it."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And it must be grand to do what hardly anybody can do."
+
+"In the way of marrying, Jenny?"
+
+"In any way," responded Miss Fraser, who was an enthusiast, and
+habitually sentimental. "What would I give to do even one unique thing,
+or to marry even one unique person!"
+
+"You couldn't marry two at the same time--in England."
+
+"England limits itself so terribly; but there is a broader time coming.
+Those who see it, and act upon what they see, are pioneers; Mr. Lane is
+a pioneer."
+
+"But don't you think him rather extravagant?"
+
+"Oh yes. That is so splendid. I love the extravagance of genius, the
+barbaric lavishness of moral and intellectual supremacy."
+
+"I wonder whether the supremacy of Eustace Lane is moral, or
+intellectual, or--neither?" said Winifred. "There are so many different
+supremacies, aren't there? I suppose a man might be supreme merely as
+a--as a--well, an absurdity, you know."
+
+Jenny smiled the watery smile of the sentimentalist; a glass of still
+lemonade washed with limelight might resemble it.
+
+"Eustace Lane likes you, Winnie," she remarked.
+
+"I know; that is why I am wondering about him. One does wonder, you see,
+about the man one may possibly be going to marry."
+
+There had never been such a man for Jane Fraser, so she said nothing,
+but succeeded in looking confidential.
+
+Presently Winifred allowed her happy foil to lace her up. She was going
+to a ball given by the Lanes in Carlton House Terrace.
+
+"Perhaps he will propose to you to-night," whispered Jane in a gush of
+excitement as the two girls walked down the stairs to the carriage. "If
+he does, what will you say?".
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Oh, darling, but surely----"
+
+"Eustace is so odd. I can't make him out."
+
+"That is because he is a genius."
+
+"He is certainly remarkable--in a way. Good-night, dear."
+
+The carriage drove off, and the happy foil joined her maid, who was
+waiting to conduct her home. On the way they gossipped, and the maid
+expressed a belief that Mr. Lane was a fine young gentleman, but full of
+his goings-on.
+
+Jane knew what she meant. Eustace had once kissed her publicly in Jane's
+presence, which deed the latter considered a stroke of genius, and the
+act of a true and courageous pioneer.
+
+Eustace was now just twenty-two, and he had already partially succeeded
+in his ambition. His mask had deceived his world, and Mr. Bembridge's
+prophecy about him was beginning to be fulfilled. He had done nothing
+specially intellectual or athletic, was not particularly active either
+with limbs or brain; but people had begun to notice and to talk about
+him, to discuss him with a certain interest, even with a certain
+wonder. The newspapers occasionally mentioned him as a dandy, a fop,
+a whimsical, irresponsible creature, yet one whose vagaries were not
+entirely without interest. He had performed some extravagant antic in a
+cotillon, or worn some extraordinary coat. He had invented a new way
+of walking one season, and during another season, although in perfect
+health, he had never left the house, declaring that movement of any kind
+was ungentlemanly and ridiculous, and that an imitation of harem life
+was the uttermost bliss obtainable in London. His windows in Carlton
+House Terrace had been latticed, and when his friends came there to see
+him they found him lying, supported by cushions, on a prayer-carpet,
+eating Eastern sweetmeats from a silver box.
+
+But he soon began to tire of this deliberate imprisonment, and to reduce
+buffoonery to a modern science. His father was a rich man, and he was an
+only child. Therefore he was able to gratify the supposed whims, which
+were no whims at all. He could get up surprise parties, which really
+bored him, carry out elaborate practical jokes, give extraordinary
+entertainments at will. For his parents acquiesced in his absurdities,
+were even rather proud of them, thinking that he followed his
+Will-o'-the-wisp of a fancy because he was not less, but more, than
+other young men. In fact, they supposed he must be a genius because he
+was erratic. Many people are of the same opinion, and declare that a
+goose standing on its head must be a swan. By degrees Eustace Lane's
+practical jokes became a common topic of conversation in London, and
+smart circles were in a perpetual state of mild excitement as to what
+he would do next. It was said that he had put the latchkey of a Duchess
+down the back of a Commander-in-Chief; that he had once, in a country
+house, prepared an apple-pie bed for an Heir-apparent, and that he had
+declared he would journey to Rome next Easter in order to present a
+collection of penny toys to the Pope. Society loves folly if it is
+sufficiently blatant. The folly of Eustace was just blatant enough to
+be more than tolerated--enjoyed. He had by practice acquired a knack
+of being silly in unexpected ways, and so a great many people honestly
+considered him one of the cleverest young men in town.
+
+But, you know, it is the proper thing, if you wear a mask, to have a sad
+face behind it. Eustace sometimes felt sad, and sometimes fatigued. He
+had worked a little to make his reputation, but it was often hard labour
+to live up to it. His profession of a buffoon sometimes exhausted him,
+but he could no longer dare to be like others. The self-conscious live
+to gratify the changing expectations of their world, and Eustace had
+educated himself into a self-consciousness that was almost a disease.
+
+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.
+
+And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really
+strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose
+to believe his own hair.
+
+They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his
+guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception.
+
+In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst
+taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun
+to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after
+the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a
+second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel
+that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the
+happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that
+Bluebeard's Chamber, the honeymoon.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Winifred anticipated this honeymoon with calmness, but Eustace was too
+much in love to be calm. He was, on the contrary, in a high state of
+excitement, and of emotion, and the effort of making his ridiculous
+speech had nearly sent him into hysterics. But he had now fully resolved
+to continue in his whimsical course, and to play for ever the part of a
+highly erratic genius, driven hither and thither by the weird impulses
+of the moment. That he never had any impulses but such as were common to
+most ordinary young men was a sad fact which he meant to most carefully
+conceal from Winifred. He had made up his mind that she believed his
+mask to be his face. She had, therefore, married the mask. To divorce
+her violently from it might be fatal to their happiness. If he showed
+the countenance God had given him, she might cry: "I don't know you.
+You are a stranger. You are like all the other men I didn't choose to
+marry." His blood ran cold at the thought. No, he must keep it up. She
+loved his fantasies because she believed them natural to him. She must
+never suspect that they were not natural. So, as they travelled, he
+planned the campaign of married life, as doubtless others, strange in
+their new bondage, have planned. He gazed at Winifred, and thought,
+"What is her notion of the ideal husband, I wonder?" She gazed at him,
+and mused on his affection and his whimsicality, and what the two would
+lead to in connection with her fate. And the old, scarlet-faced guard
+smiled fatuously at them both through the window on which glared a
+prominent "Engaged" as he had smiled on many another pair of fools--so
+he silently dubbed them. Then they entered Bluebeard's Chamber and
+closed the door behind them.
+
+Brighton was their destination. They meant to lose themselves in a
+marine crowd.
+
+They stayed there for a fortnight, and then returned to town, Eustace
+more in love than ever.
+
+But Winifred?
+
+One afternoon she sat in the drawing-room of the pretty little house
+they had taken in Deanery Street, Park Lane. She was thinking, very
+definitely. The silent processes of even an ordinary woman's mind--what
+great male writer would not give two years of his life to sit with them
+and watch them, as the poet watches the flight of a swallow, or the
+astronomer the processions of the sky? A curious gale was raging through
+the town, touzling its thatch of chimney-pots, doing violence to
+the demureness of its respectable streets. Night was falling, and in
+Piccadilly those strange, gay hats that greet the darkness were coming
+out like eager, vulgar comets in a dim and muttering firmament. It was
+just the moment when the outside mood of the huge city begins to undergo
+a change, to glide from its comparative simplicity of afternoon into
+its leering complexity of evening. Each twenty-four hours London has its
+moment of emancipation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe
+and the good to wonder, when "How?" and "Why?" are on the lips of the
+opposing factions, and only the philosophers who know--or think they
+know--their human nature hold themselves still, and feel that man is at
+the least ceaselessly interesting.
+
+Winifred sat by the fire and held a council. She called her thoughts
+together and gave audience to her suspicions, and her brown eyes were
+wide and rather mournful as her counsellors uttered each a word of hope
+or of warning.
+
+Eustace was out. He had gone to a concert, and had not returned.
+
+She was holding a council to decide something in reference to him.
+
+The honeymoon weeks had brought her just as far as the question, "Do I
+know my husband at all, or is he, so far, a total stranger?"
+
+Some people seem to draw near to you as you look at them steadily,
+others to recede until they reach the verge of invisibility. Which was
+Eustace doing? Did his outline become clearer or more blurred? Was he
+daily more definite or more phantasmal? And the members of her council
+drew near and whispered their opinions in Winifred's attentive ears.
+They were not all in accord at the first. Pros fought with cons, elbowed
+them, were hustled in return. Sometimes there was almost a row, and she
+had to stretch forth her hands and hush the tumult. For she desired a
+calm conclave, although she was a woman.
+
+And the final decision--if, indeed, it could be arrived at that
+evening--was important. Love seemed to hang upon it, and all the sweets
+of life; and the little wings of Love fluttered anxiously, as the little
+wings of a bird flutter when you hold it in the cage of your hands,
+prisoning it from its wayward career through the blue shadows of the
+summer.
+
+For love is not always and for ever instinctive--not even the finest
+love. While many women love because they must, whether the thing to be
+loved or not loved be carrion or crystal, a child of the gods or an imp
+of the devil, others love decisively because they see--perhaps can even
+analyze--a beauty that is there in the thing before them. One woman
+loves a man simply because he kisses her. Another loves him because he
+has won the Victoria Cross.
+
+Winifred was not of the women who love because they are kissed.
+
+She had accepted Eustace rather impulsively, but she had not married him
+quite uncritically. There was something new, different from other
+men, about him which attracted her, as well as his good looks--that
+prettiness which had peeped out from the white wig in the scarlet nook
+at the ball. His oddities at that time she had grown thoroughly to
+believe in, and, believing in them, she felt she liked them. She
+supposed them to spring, rather like amazing spotted orchids, from
+the earth of a quaint nature. Now, after a honeymoon spent among the
+orchids, she held this council while the wind blew London into a mood of
+evening irritation.
+
+What was Eustace?
+
+How the wind sang over Park Lane! Yet the stars were coming out.
+
+What was he? A genius or a clown? A creature to spread a buttered slide
+or a man to climb to heaven? A fine, free child of Nature, who did,
+freshly, what he would, regardless of the strained discretion
+of others, or a futile, scheming hypocrite, screaming after forced
+puerilities, without even a finger on the skirts of originality?
+
+It was a problem for lonely woman's debate. Winifred strove to weigh it
+well. In Bluebeard's Chamber Eustace had cut many capers. This activity
+she had expected--had even wished for. And at first she had been amused
+and entertained by the antics, as one assisting at a good burlesque,
+through which, moreover, a piquant love theme runs. But by degrees she
+began to feel a certain stiffness in the capers, a self-consciousness in
+the antics, or fancied she began to feel it, and instead of being always
+amused she became often thoughtful.
+
+Whimsicality she loved. Buffoonery she possibly, even probably, could
+learn to hate.
+
+Of Eustace's love for her she had no doubt. She was certain of his
+affection. But was it worth having? That depended, surely, on the nature
+of the man in whom it sprang, from whom it flowed. She wanted to be sure
+of that nature; but she acknowledged to herself, as she sat by the fire,
+that she was perplexed. Perhaps even that perplexity was merciful. Yet
+she wished to sweep it away. She knit her brows moodily, and longed for
+a secret divining-rod that would twist to reveal truth in another.
+For truth, she thought, is better than hidden water-springs, and a
+sincerity--even of stupidity--more lovely than the fountain that gives
+flowers to the desert, wild red roses to the weary gold of sands.
+
+The wind roared again, howling to poor, shuddering Mayfair, and there
+came a step outside. Eustace sprang in upon Winifred's council, looking
+like a gay schoolboy, his cheeks flushed, his lips open to speak.
+
+"Dreaming?" he said.
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"That concert paralyzed me. Too much Beethoven. I wanted Wagner.
+Beethoven insists on exalting you, but Wagner lets you revel and feel
+naughty. Winnie, d'you hear the wind?"
+
+"Could I help it?" she asked.
+
+"Does it suggest something to you?"
+
+He looked at her, and made his expression mischievous, or meant to make
+it. She looked up at him, too.
+
+"Yes, many things," she said--"many, many things."
+
+"To me it suggests kites."
+
+"Kites?"
+
+"Yes. I'm going to fly one now in the Park. The stars are out. Put on
+your hat and come with me."
+
+He seemed all impulse, sparkling to the novelty of the idea.
+
+"Well, but------" She hesitated.
+
+"I've got one--a beauty, a monster! I noticed the wind was getting up
+yesterday. Come!"
+
+He pulled at her hand; she obeyed him, not quickly. She put on her hat,
+a plain straw, a thick jacket, gloves. Kite-flying in London seemed an
+odd notion. Was it lively and entertaining, or merely silly? Which ought
+it to be?
+
+Eustace shouted to her from the tiny hall.
+
+"Hurry!" he cried.
+
+The wind yelled beyond the door, and Winifred ran down, beginning to
+feel a childish thrill of excitement. Eustace held the kite. It was,
+indeed, a white monster, gaily decorated with fluttering scarlet and
+blue ribbons.
+
+"We shall be mobbed," she said.
+
+"There's no one about," he answered. "The gale frightens people."
+
+He opened the door, and they were out in the crying tempest. The great
+clouds flew along the sky like an army in retreat. Some, to Winifred,
+seemed soldiers, others baggage-waggons, horses, gun-carriages, rushing
+pell-mell for safety. One drooping, tattered cloud she deemed the
+colours of a regiment streaming under the stars that peeped out here
+and there--watching sentinel eyes, obdurate, till some magic password
+softened them.
+
+As they crossed the road she spoke of her cloud army to Eustace.
+
+"This kite's like a live thing," was his reply. "It tugs as a fish tugs
+a line."
+
+He did not care for the tumult of a far-off world.
+
+They entered the Park. It seemed, indeed, strangely deserted. A
+swaggering soldier passed them by, going towards the Marble Arch. His
+spurs clinked; his long cloak gleamed like a huge pink carnation in
+the dingy dimness of the startled night. How he stared with his
+unintelligent, though bold, eyes as he saw the kite bounding to be free.
+
+Eustace seemed delighted.
+
+"That man thinks us mad!" he said.
+
+"Are we mad?" Winifred asked, surprised at her own strange enjoyment of
+the adventure.
+
+"Who knows?" said Eustace, looking at her narrowly. "You like this
+escapade?"
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+"My mask!" he thought, secretly longing to be quietly by the fire
+sipping tea and reading _Punch_. "She loves that."
+
+They were through the trees now, across the broad path, out on the open
+lawns.
+
+"Now for it!" he shouted, as the wind roared in their faces.
+
+He paid out the coils of the thin cord. The white monster skimmed,
+struggled near the ground, returned, darted again upward and outward,
+felt for the wind's hands, caught them and sprang, with a mad courage,
+star-wards, its gay ribbons flying like coloured birds to mark its
+course. But soon they were lost to sight, and only a diminished,
+ghost-like shadow leaping against the black showed where the kite beat
+on to liberty.
+
+Eustace ran with the wind, and Winifred followed him. The motion sent
+an exultation dancing through her veins, and stirred her blood into a
+ferment. The noises in the trees, the galloping music of the airs on
+their headlong courses, rang in her ears like clashing bells. She called
+as she ran, but never knew what words. She leaped, as if over glorious
+obstacles. Her feet danced on the short grass. She had a sudden notion:
+"I am living now!" and Eustace had never seemed so near to her. He had
+an art to find why children are happy, she thought, because they do
+little strange things, coupling mechanical movements, obvious actions
+that may seem absurd, with soft flights of the imagination, that wrap
+their prancings and their leaps in golden robes, and give to the dull
+world a glory. The hoop is their demon enemy, whom they drive before
+them to destruction. The kite is a great white bird, whom they hold
+back for a time from heaven. Suddenly Winifred longed to feel the bird's
+efforts to be free.
+
+"Let me have it!" she cried to Eustace, holding out her hands eagerly.
+"Do let me!"
+
+He was glad to pass the cord to her, being utterly tired of a prank
+which he thought idiotic, and he could not understand the light that
+sprang into her eyes as she grasped it, and felt the life of the
+lifeless thing that soared towards the clouds.
+
+For the moment it was more to her--this tugging, scarce visible, white
+thing--than all the world of souls. It gave to her the excitement of
+battle, the joy of strife. She felt herself a Napoleon with empires in
+her hand; a Diana holding eternities, instead of hounds, in leash. She
+had quite the children's idea of kites, the sense of being in touch with
+the infinite that enters into baby pleasures, and makes the remembrance
+of them live in us when we are old, and have forgotten wild passions,
+strange fruitions, that have followed them and faded away for ever.
+
+How the creature tore at her! She fancied she felt the pulsings of its
+fly-away heart, beating with energy and great hopes of freedom. And
+suddenly, with a call, she opened her hands. Her captive was lost in the
+night.
+
+In a moment she felt sad, such a foolish sorrow, as a gaoler may feel
+sad who has grown to love his prisoner, and sees him smile when the
+gaping door gives him again to crime.
+
+"It's gone," she said to Eustace; "I think it's glad to go."
+
+"Glad--a kite!" he said.
+
+And it struck her that he would have thought it equally sensible if she
+had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the
+Homeric passions of wooden dolls.
+
+Then, why had he been prompted by the wind to play the boy if he had
+none of the boy's ardent imagination?
+
+They reached Deanery Street, and passed in from the night and the
+elements. Eustace shut the door with a sigh of relief. Winifred's
+echoing sigh was of regret.
+
+It seemed a listless world--the world inside a lighted London house,
+dominated by a pale butler with black side-whiskers and endless
+discretion. But Eustace did not feel it so. Winifred knew that beyond
+hope of doubt as she stole a glance at his face. He had put off the
+child--the buffoon--and looked for the moment a grave, dull young man,
+naturally at ease with all the conventions. She could not help saying
+to herself, as she went to her room to live with hairpins and her
+lady's-maid: "I believe he hated it all!"
+
+From that night of kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her
+husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even
+in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she
+was not afraid of--could even love, being a searcher after the new
+and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck
+eccentricity--Brummagem originalities--gave to her views of the poverty
+of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with
+contempt.
+
+And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous
+as he began to note the lassitude which gradually crept into her
+intercourse with him. London rang with them. At one time he pretended to
+a strange passion for death; prayed to a skull which grinned in a shrine
+raised for it in his dressing-room; lay down each day in a coffin, and
+asked Winifred to close it and scatter earth upon the lid, that he might
+realize the end towards which we journey. He talked of silence, long
+and loudly--an irony which Winifred duly noted--sneered at the fleeting
+phantoms in the show of existence, called the sobbing of women, the
+laughter of men, sounds as arid as the whizz of a cracker let off by a
+child on the fifth of November.
+
+"We should kill our feelings," he said. "They make us absurd. Life
+should be a breathing calm, as death is a breathless calm."
+
+The calm descending upon Winifred was of the benumbing order.
+
+Later he recoiled from this coquetting with the destroyer.
+
+"After all," he said, "which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt
+from the penalty of the race? You don't believe that you will ever die,
+Winifred?"
+
+"I know it," she said.
+
+"Yes, but you don't believe it."
+
+"You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at
+least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be
+like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and
+supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers,
+and touched the hand of one's hostess, and swung round in a final
+gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all--one wants to go home."
+
+"Does one?" Eustace said. "Home you call it!"
+
+He shuddered.
+
+"I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor
+and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us,
+at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is."
+
+"You have strange fancies," he said.
+
+"I! Not so strange as yours."
+
+She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look
+meant. It seemed to him a menace.
+
+"I must keep it up--I must keep it up," he murmured to himself as he
+left the room. "Winifred loves fancies--loves me for what she thinks
+mine."
+
+He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages
+on the ordinary.
+
+His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original
+figure of London. The papers quoted him--his doings, not his sayings.
+People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the
+Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the
+observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.
+
+At least, so a wag declared.
+
+And Winifred bore it, but with an increasing impatience.
+
+At this time, too, a strange need of protection crept over her, the
+yearning for man's beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in
+her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the
+truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly,
+with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus
+of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the
+prison rules of the fantastic. Winifred's entry was as that of a warder.
+He sprang up laughing.
+
+"Winnie," he said, "I think I am going to South Africa."
+
+"You!" she said in surprise.
+
+"Yes; to give acrobatic performances in the street, and so pave the way
+to a position as a millionaire. Who ever heard of a man rising from a
+respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must
+start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten
+thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours
+the pauper. I am mad about money to-day. I can think of nothing else."
+
+And he began showing her conjuring tricks with sovereigns which he drew
+from his pockets.
+
+She did not tell him that day. And when she told him, it was without
+apparent emotion. She seemed merely stating coldly a physical fact,
+not breathing out a beautiful secret of her soul and his, a consecrated
+wonder to shake them both, and bind them together as two flowers are
+bound in the centre of a bouquet, the envy of the other flowers.
+
+"Eustace," she said, and her eyes were clear and her hands were still,
+"I think I ought to tell you--we shall have a child."
+
+Her voice was unwavering as a doctor's which pronounces, "You have the
+influenza." She stood there before him.
+
+"Winifred!" he cried, looking up. His impulse was to say, "Wife! My
+Winifred!" to take her in his arms as any clerk might take his little
+middle-class spouse, to kiss her lips, and, in doing it, fancy he drew
+near to the prison in which every soul eternally dwells on earth. Finely
+human he felt, as the dullest, the most unknown, the plainest, the
+most despised, may feel, thank God! "Winifred!" he cried. And then he
+stopped, with the shooting thought, "Even now I must be what she thinks
+me, what she perhaps loves me for."
+
+She stood there silently waiting.
+
+"Toys!" he exclaimed. "Toys have always been my besetting sin. Now I
+will make a grand collection, not for the Pope, as people pretend, but
+for our family. You will have two children to laugh at, Winnie. Your
+husband is one, you know." He sprang up. "I'll go into the Strand," he
+said. "There's a man near the Temple who has always got some delightful
+novelty displaying its paces on the pavement. What fun!"
+
+And off he went, leaving Winifred alone with the mystery of her woman's
+world, the mystic mystery of birth that may dawn out of hate as out of
+love, out of drunken dissipation as out of purity's sweet climax.
+
+Next day a paragraph in the papers told how Mr. Eustace Lane had bought
+up all the penny toys of the Strand. Mention was again made of his
+supposed mission to the Vatican, and a picture drawn of the bewilderment
+of the Holy Father, roused from contemplation of the eternal to
+contemplation of jumping pasteboard, and the frigid gestures of people
+from the world of _papier-mache_.
+
+Eustace showed the paragraph to Winifred.
+
+"Why will they chronicle all I do?" he said, with a sigh.
+
+"Would you rather they did not?"
+
+"Oh, if it amuses them," he answered. "To amuse the world is to be its
+benefactor."
+
+"No, to comfort the world," was Winifred's silent thought. .
+
+To her the world often seemed a weary invalid, playing cards on the
+coverlet of the bed from which it longed in vain to move, peeping with
+heavy eyes at the shrouded windows of its chamber, and listening for
+faint sounds from without--soft songs, soft murmurings, the breath of
+winds, the sigh of showers; then turning with a smothered groan to its
+cards again, its lengthy game of "Patience." Clubs, spades, hearts,
+diamonds--there they all lay on the coverlet ready to the hands of the
+invalid. But she wanted to take them away, and give to the sufferer a
+prayer and a hope.
+
+At this period she was often full of a vague, chaotic tenderness,
+far-reaching, yet indefinite. She could rather have kissed the race than
+a person.
+
+And so the days went by, Winifred in a dream of wonder, Eustace in the
+toy-shops.
+
+Until the birthday dawned and faded.
+
+All through that day Eustace was in agony. He did not care so much for
+the child, but he loved the mother. Her danger tore at his heart. Her
+pain smote him, till he seemed to feel it actually and physically. That
+she was giving him something was naught to him; that she might be taken
+away in the giving was everything. And when he learnt that all was well,
+he cried and prayed, and thought to himself afterwards, "If Winifred
+could know what I am like, what I have done to-day, how would it strike
+her?"
+
+She did not know; for when at length Eustace was admitted to her room,
+he trained himself to murmur, "A girl, that's lucky because of all the
+dolls. The Pope sha'n't have even one now."
+
+Winifred lay back white on her pillow, and a little frown travelled
+across her face. If Eustace had just kissed her, and she had felt a tear
+of his on her face, and he had said nothing, she could have loved him
+then as a father, perhaps, more than as a husband. His allusion to the
+supposed Papal absurdity disgusted her at such a time, only faintly,
+because of her weakness, but distinctly, and in a way to be remembered.
+
+She recovered; but just as the child was beginning to smile, and to
+express an approbation of life by murmurous gurglings, an infantile
+disease gripped it, held it, would not release it. And Winifred knelt
+beside it, dead, and thought, with a new and vital horror, of the
+invalid world playing cards upon the drawn coverlet of its bed. Baby was
+outside that chamber now, beyond the curtained windows, outside in sun
+or shower that she could not see, could only dream of, while the game of
+"Patience" went on and on.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The death of the child meant more to Winifred than she would at first
+acknowledge even to herself. Almost unconsciously she had looked forward
+to its birth as to a release from bondage. There are moments when a duet
+is gaol, a trio comparative liberty. The child, the tiny intruder into
+youthful married life, may come in the guise of an imp or of a good
+fairy: one to cloud the perfect and complete joy of two, or one to give
+sunlight to their nascent weariness and dissatisfaction. Or, again, it
+may be looked for with longing by one of two lovers, with apprehension
+by the other. Only when it lay dead did Winifred understand that Eustace
+was to her a stranger, and that she was lonely alone with him. The "Au
+revoir" of two bodies may be sweet, but the "Au revoir" of two minds is
+generally but a hypocritical or sarcastic rendering of the tragic word
+"Adieu." Winifred's mind cried "Au revoir" to the mind of Eustace, to
+his nature, to his love, but deep in her soul trembled the minor music,
+the shuddering discord, of "Adieu." Adieu to the body of child; adieu
+more complete, more eternal, to the soul of husband. Which good bye was
+the stranger? She stood as at cross-roads, and watched, with hand-shaded
+eyes, the tiny, wayward babe dwindling on its journey to heaven; the man
+she had married dwindling on his journey--whither? And the one she had a
+full hope of meeting again, but the other----
+
+After the funeral the Lanes took up once more the old dual life which
+had been momentarily interrupted. Had it not been for the interruption,
+Winifred fancied that she might not have awakened to the full knowledge
+of her own feelings towards Eustace until a much later period. But the
+baby's birth, existence, passing away, were a blow upon the gate of life
+from the vague without. She had opened the gate, caught a glimpse of the
+shadowy land of the possible. And to do that is often to realize in a
+flash the impossibility of one's individual fate. So many of us manage
+to live ignorantly all our days and to call ourselves happy. Winifred
+could never live quite ignorantly again.
+
+To Eustace the interruption meant much less. So long as he had Winifred
+he could not feel that any of his dreams hung altogether in tatters.
+Sometimes, it is true, he contemplated the penny toys, and had a moment
+of quaint, not unpleasant regret, half forming the thought, Why do we
+ever trouble ourselves to prepare happiness for others, when happiness
+is a word of a thousand meanings? As often as not, to do so is to set
+a dinner of many courses and many wines before an unknown guest, who
+proves to be vegetarian and teetotaler, after all.
+
+"What shall I do with the toys?" he asked Winifred one day.
+
+"The toys? Oh, give them to a children's hospital," she said, and her
+voice had a harsh note in it.
+
+"No," he answered, after a moment's reflection; "I'll keep them and play
+with them myself; you know I love toys."
+
+And on the following Sunday, when many callers came to Deanery Street,
+they found him in the drawing-room, playing with a Noah's ark. Red,
+green, violet, and azure elephants, antelopes, zebras, and pigs
+processed along the carpet, guided by an orange-coloured Noah in a
+purple top-hat, and a perfect parterre of sons and wives. The fixed
+anxiety of their painted faces suggested that they were in apprehension
+of the flood, but their rigid attitudes implied trust in the Unseen.
+
+Winifred's face that day seemed changed to those who knew her best.
+To one man, a soldier who had admired her greatly before her marriage,
+and\who had seen no reason to change his opinion of her since, she was
+more cordial than usual, and he went away curiously meditating on the
+mystery of women.
+
+"What has happened to Mrs. Lane?" he thought to himself as he walked
+down Park Lane. "That last look of hers at me, when I was by the door,
+going, was--yes, I'll swear it--Regent Street. And yet Winnie Lane is
+the purest--I'm hanged if I can make out women! Anyhow, I'll go there
+again. People say she and that fantastic ass she's married are devoted.
+H'm!" He went to Pall Mall, and sat staring at nothing in his Club till
+seven, deep in the mystery of the female sex.
+
+And he went again to Deanery Street to see whether the vision of Regent
+Street was deceptive, and came away wondering and hoping. From this time
+the vagaries of Eustace Lane became more incessant, more flamboyant,
+than ever, and Mrs. Lane was perpetually in society. If it would not
+have been true to say, conventionally, that no party was complete
+without her, yet it certainly seemed, from this time, that she was
+incomplete without a party. She was the starving wolf after the sledge
+in which sat the gay world. If the sledge escaped her, she was left to
+face darkness, snow, wintry winds, loneliness. In London do we not often
+hear the dismal howling of the wolves, suggesting steppes of the heart
+frigid as Siberia?
+
+Eustace grew uneasy, for Winifred seemed eluding him in this maze of
+entertainments. He could not impress the personality of his mask upon
+her vitally when she moved perpetually in the pantomime processions of
+society, surrounded by grotesques, mimes, dancers, and deformities.
+
+"We are scarcely ever alone, Winnie," he said to her one day.
+
+"You must learn to love me in a crowd," she answered. "Human nature can
+love even God in isolation, but the man who can love God in the world is
+the true Christian."
+
+"I can love you anywhere," he said. "But you------" And then he stopped
+and quickly readjusted his mask which was slipping off.
+
+From that day he monotonously accentuated his absurdities. All London
+rang with them. He was the Court Fool of Mayfair, the buffoon of the
+inner circles of the Metropolis, and, by degrees, his painted fame,
+jangling the bells in its cap, spun about England in a dervish dance,
+till Peckham whispered of him, and even the remotest suburbs crowned
+him with parsley and hung upon his doings. All the blooming flowers of
+notoriety were his, to hug in his arms as he stood upon his platform
+bowing to the general applause. His shrine in _Vanity Fair_ was surely
+being prepared. But he scarcely thought of this, being that ordinary,
+ridiculous, middle-class thing, an immoderately loving husband, insane
+enough to worship romantically the woman to whom he was unromantically
+tied by the law of his country. With each new fantasy he hoped to win
+back that which he had lost. Each joke was the throw of a desperate
+gamester, each tricky invention a stake placed on the number that would
+never turn up. That wild time of his career was humorous to the world,
+how tragic to himself we can only wonder. He spread wings like a bird,
+flew hither and thither as if a vagrant for pure joy and the pleasure
+of movement, darted and poised, circled and sailed, but all the time
+his heart cried aloud for a nest and Winifred. Yet he wooed her only
+silently by his follies, and set her each day farther and farther from
+him.
+
+And she--how she hated his notoriety, and was sick with weariness when
+voices told her of his escapades, modulating themselves to wondering
+praise. Long ago she had known that Eustace sinned against his own
+nature, but she had never loved him quite enough to discover what that
+nature really was. And now she had no desire to find out. He was only
+her husband and the least of all men to her.
+
+The Lanes sat at breakfast one morning and took up their letters.
+Winifred sipped her tea, and opened one or two carelessly. They were
+invitations. Then she tore, the envelope of a third, and, as she read
+it, forgot to sip her tea. Presently she laid it down slowly. Eustace
+was looking at her.
+
+"Winifred," he said, "I have got a letter from the editor of _Vanity
+Fair_."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He wishes me to permit a caricature of myself to appear in his pages."
+
+Winifred's fingers closed sharply on the letter she had just been
+reading. A decision of hers in regard to the writer of it was hanging in
+the balance, though Eustace did not know it.
+
+"Well?" said Eustace, inquiring of her silence.
+
+"What are you going to reply?" she asked.
+
+"I am wondering."
+
+She chipped an eggshell and took a bit of dry toast.
+
+"All those who appear in _Vanity Fair_ are celebrated, aren't they?" she
+said.
+
+"I suppose so," Eustace said.
+
+"For many different things."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Can you refuse the editor's request?"
+
+"I don't know why I should."
+
+"Exactly. Tell me when you have written to him, and what you have
+written, Eustace."
+
+"Yes, Winnie, I will."
+
+Later on in the day he came up to her boudoir, and said to her:
+
+"I have told him I am quite willing to have my caricature in his paper."
+
+"Your portrait," she said. "All right. Leave me now, Eustace; I have
+some writing to do."
+
+As soon as he had gone she sat down and wrote a short letter, which she
+posted herself.
+
+A month later Eustace came bounding up the stairs to find her.
+
+"Winnie, Winnie!" he called. "Where are you? I've something to show
+you."
+
+He held a newspaper in his hand. Winifred was not in the room. Eustace
+rang the bell.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Lane?" he asked of the footman who answered it.
+
+"Gone out, sir," the man answered.
+
+"And not back yet? It's very late," said Eustace, looking at his watch.
+
+The time was a quarter to eight. They were dining at half-past.
+
+"I wonder where she is," he thought.
+
+Then he sat down and gazed at a cartoon which represented a thin man
+with a preternaturally pale face, legs like sticks, and drooping hands
+full of toys--himself. Beneath it was written, "His aim is to amuse."
+
+He turned a page, and read, for the third or fourth time, the following:
+
+"Mr. Eustace Lane.
+
+"Mr. Eustace Bernhard Lane, only son of Mr. Merton Lane, of Carlton
+House Terrace, was born in London twenty-eight years ago. He is married
+to one of the belles of the day, and is probably the most envied husband
+in town.
+
+"Although he is such a noted figure in society, Mr. Eustace Lane has
+never done any conspicuously good or bad deed. He has neither invented
+a bicycle nor written a novel, neither lost a seat in Parliament, nor
+found a mine in South Africa. Careless of elevating the world, he has
+been content to entertain it, to make it laugh, or to make it wonder.
+His aim is to amuse, and his whole-souled endeavour to succeed in this
+ambition has gained him the entire respect of the frivolous. What more
+could man desire?"
+
+As he finished there came a ring at the hall-door bell.
+
+"Winifred!" he exclaimed, and jumped up with the paper in his hand.
+
+In a moment the footman entered with a note.
+
+"A boy messenger has just brought this, sir," he said.
+
+Eustace took it, and, as the man went out and shut the door, opened it,
+and read:
+
+     "Victoria Station.
+
+     "This is to say good-bye. By the time it reaches you I
+     shall have left London. Not alone. I have seen the cartoon.
+     It is very like you.
+     Winifred."
+
+Eustace sank down in a chair.
+
+On the table at his elbow lay _Vanity Fair_. Mechanically he looked at
+it, and read once more the words beneath his picture, "His aim is to
+amuse."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Folly Of Eustace, by Robert S. Hichens
+
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