fairy tales! Lewie, you must have a mind like a
lumber-room."

"I pillaged books from the big library as I wanted them," said the young
man humbly. "Do you know, Tommy, to talk quite seriously, I get more
erratic every day? Knocking about the world and living alone make me a
queer slave of whims. I am straying too far from the normal. I wish to
goodness you would take me and drive me back to the ways of common
sense."

"Meaning--?

"That I am getting cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous
about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a
sad case for a man who never used to care a straw for a soul on earth."

"Lewie, attend to me," said Wratislaw, with mock gravity. "You have not
by any chance been falling in love?"

The accused blushed like a girl, and lied withal like a trooper, to the
delight of the un-Christian George.

"Well, then, my dear fellow, there is hope for you yet. If a man once
gets sentimental, he desires to be normal above all things, for he has a
crazy intuition that it is the normal which women really like, being
themselves but a hair's-breadth from the commonplace. I suppose it is
only another of the immortal errors with which mankind hedges itself
about."

"You think it an error?" said Lewis, with such an air of relief that
George began to laugh and Wratislaw looked comically suspicious.

"Why the tone of joy, Lewie?"

"I wanted your opinion," said the perjured young man. "I thought of
writing a book. But that is not the thing I was talking about. I want
to be normal, aggressively normal, to court the suffrages of Gledsmuir.
Do you know Stocks?"

"Surely."

"An excellent person, but I never heard him utter a word above a child's
capacity. He can talk the most shrieking platitudes as if he had found
at last the one and only truth. And people are impressed."

Wratislaw pulled down his eyebrows and proceeded to defend a Scottish
constituency against the libel of gullibility. But Lewis was not
listening. He did not think of the impression made on the voting
powers, but on one small girl who clamorously impeded all his thoughts.
She was, he knew, an enthusiast for the finer sentiments of life, and of
these Mr. Stocks had long ago claimed a monopoly. He felt bitterly
jealous-the jealousy of the innocent man to whom woman is an
unaccountable creature, whose habits and likings must be curiously
studied. He was dimly conscious of lacking the stage attributes o