But this recalled me, of a sudden, to the rôle I was at that season playing to myself in the human comedy. Ingenuous young men (a. friend of mine often says), if they happen to have an active imagination, are the most inveterate, the most incorrigible of poseurs. To make the matter worse, they’re the first—if not the only—ones to be taken in by their pose. They believe in it heartily; they’re supremely unconscious that they’re posing. And so they go on, slipping from one pose to another, till in the end, by accident as like as not, they find the pose that suits them. And when a man has found the pose that suits him (I am still quoting my friend) we say that he has “found himself.” The Contessa’s suggestion recalled me to my pose of the season. I repudiated the idea of happiness with scorn. “Happy!” I echoed bitterly. “I should think not. I shall never be happy again.” “Mercy upon me!” she exclaimed. “Si jeune, et déjà Moldave-Valaque!” “Oh,” I informed her, with Byronic gloom, “it isn’t a laughing matter. I’m the most miserable of men.” “Poor boy,” she said compassionately; and her eyes shone with compassion too, though perhaps there still lingered in them just the faintest afterglow of amusement. “Why are you miserable? What is it all about?” “Oh,” I said, “it’s the usual story. When a man’s hopelessly unhappy, when his last illusion has been destroyed, it’s always—I’m sorry to say it to you, but you know whether it’s true—it’s always a member of your sex that’s to blame.” Had she a struggle to keep from laughing? If so, she came out of it victorious. Indeed, the compassion in her eyes seemed to deepen. “Poor boy,” she repeated. “What have they done to you? Tell me all about it. It will do you good to tell me. Let me be your confidante,” she urged gently. And thereupon (oh, fatuity!) I strode up and down her floor, and narrated the whole history of my desperate, my fatal passion for Elsie Milray: how beautiful Elsie was, how mysteriously, incommunicably fascinating; how I had adored her; how she had encouraged me, led me on, trifled with me, and finally thrown me over—for Captain Bullen, a fellow in the Engineers, old enough to be—well, almost old enough to be her father. I fancy I swung my arms about a good deal, and quoted Heine and Rossetti, and generally made myself very tiresome and ridiculous; but my kind confidante listened with patience, with every appearance of taking my narration seriously. “So you see,” I concluded, “I’ve been hard hit, hit in a vital spot. My wound is one of those that never heal.”