ll asleep again!"

"I fall asleep very easily," said Bernard.

Gordon looked at him from head to foot, smiling and shaking his head.

"You are not changed," he said. "You have travelled in unknown lands;
you have had, I suppose, all sorts of adventures; but you are the same
man I used to know."

"I am sorry for that!"

"You have the same way of representing--of misrepresenting, yourself."

"Well, if I am not changed," said Bernard, "I can ill afford to lose so
valuable an art."

"Taking you altogether, I am glad you are the same," Gordon answered,
simply; "but you must come into my part of the house."

CHAPTER XVII

Yes, he was conscious--he was very conscious; so Bernard reflected
during the two or three first days of his visit to his friend. Gordon
knew it must seem strange to so irreverent a critic that a man who had
once aspired to the hand of so intelligent a girl--putting other things
aside--as Angela Vivian should, as the Ghost in "Hamlet" says, have
"declined upon" a young lady who, in force of understanding, was so very
much Miss Vivian's inferior; and this knowledge kept him ill at his
ease and gave him a certain pitiable awkwardness. Bernard's sense of
the anomaly grew rapidly less acute; he made various observations which
helped it to seem natural. Blanche was wonderfully pretty; she was very
graceful, innocent, amusing. Since Gordon had determined to marry a
little goose, he had chosen the animal with extreme discernment. It had
quite the plumage of a swan, and it sailed along the stream of life with
an extraordinary lightness of motion. He asked himself indeed at times
whether Blanche were really so silly as she seemed; he doubted whether
any woman could be so silly as Blanche seemed. He had a suspicion at
times that, for ends of her own, she was playing a part--the suspicion
arising from the fact that, as usually happens in such cases, she
over-played it. Her empty chatter, her futility, her childish coquetry
and frivolity--such light wares could hardly be the whole substance of
any woman's being; there was something beneath them which Blanche was
keeping out of sight. She had a scrap of a mind somewhere, and even a
little particle of a heart. If one looked long enough one might catch a
glimpse of these possessions. But why should she keep them out of sight,
and what were the ends that she proposed to serve by this uncomfortable
perversity? Bernard wondered whether she were fond of her