Mortimer, disregarding the light interruption, and
laying a hand upon Eugene's shoulder, as he, Mortimer, stood before him
seated on his bed, 'you are withholding something from me.'

Eugene looked at him, but said nothing.

'All this past summer, you have been withholding something from me.
Before we entered on our boating vacation, you were as bent upon it as I
have seen you upon anything since we first rowed together. But you cared
very little for it when it came, often found it a tie and a drag upon
you, and were constantly away. Now it was well enough half-a-dozen
times, a dozen times, twenty times, to say to me in your own odd manner,
which I know so well and like so much, that your disappearances were
precautions against our boring one another; but of course after a short
while I began to know that they covered something. I don't ask what it
is, as you have not told me; but the fact is so. Say, is it not?'

'I give you my word of honour, Mortimer,' returned Eugene, after a
serious pause of a few moments, 'that I don't know.'

'Don't know, Eugene?'

'Upon my soul, don't know. I know less about myself than about most
people in the world, and I don't know.'

'You have some design in your mind?'

'Have I? I don't think I have.'

'At any rate, you have some subject of interest there which used not to
be there?'

'I really can't say,' replied Eugene, shaking his head blankly, after
pausing again to reconsider. 'At times I have thought yes; at other
times I have thought no. Now, I have been inclined to pursue such a
subject; now I have felt that it was absurd, and that it tired and
embarrassed me. Absolutely, I can't say. Frankly and faithfully, I would
if I could.'

So replying, he clapped a hand, in his turn, on his friend's shoulder,
as he rose from his seat upon the bed, and said:

'You must take your friend as he is. You know what I am, my dear
Mortimer. You know how dreadfully susceptible I am to boredom. You know
that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum,
I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant.
You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more.
Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered?
The old nursery form runs, "Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree, p'raps you can't
tell me what this may be?" My reply runs, "No. Upon my life, I can't."'

So much of what was fantastically true to his own knowledge of thi