"Possibly," answered Charles, with more carelessness than he felt; for he could not help being struck with the sententiousness of Thomas's reply, if not with the meaning contained in it. As he was not devoid of reverence, however, and had been spurred on to say what he had said more from the sense of an undefined incongruity between Thomas's habits, talk included, and the impression his general individuality made upon him, than from any wish to cry down the creed in which he took no practical interest, he went no farther in the direction in which the conversation was leading. He doubled. "If your soul be safe, Tom, why should you be so gloomy?" "Are there no souls to save but mine? There's yours now." "Is that why you put on your shiny trot-boxes and your lavender trousers, old fellow? Come, don't be stuck up. I can't stand it." "As you please, Charles: I love you too much to mind your making game of me." "Come, now," said Charles Wither, "speak right out as I am doing to you. You seem to know something I don't. If you would only speak right out, who knows if you mightn't convert me, and save my soul, too, that you make such a fuss about. For my part, I haven't found out that I have a soul yet. What am I to do with it before I know I've got it? But that's not the point. It's the trousers. When I feel miserable about myself--" "Nonsense, Charles! you never do." "But I do, though. I want something I haven't got often enough; and, for the life of me, I don't know what it is. Sometimes I think it's a wife. Sometimes I think it's freedom to do whatever I please. Sometimes I think it's a bottle of claret and a jolly good laugh. But to return to the trousers." "Now leave my trousers alone. It's quite disgusting to treat serious things after such a fashion." "I didn't know trousers were serious things--except to old grandfather Adam. But it's not about your trousers I was talking. It was about my own." "I see nothing particular about yours." "That's because I'm neither glad nor sorry." "What _do_ you mean?" "Now you come to the point. That's just what I wanted to come to myself, only you wouldn't let me. You kept shying like a half-broke filly." "Come now, Charles, you know nothing about horses, I am very sure." Charles Wither smiled, and took no other notice of the asseveration. "What I mean is this," he said, "that when I am in a serious, dull-gray, foggy mood, you know--not like this sky--" But when he looked up, the sky was indeed one mass of leaden gray. The glory of the unconditioned had yielded to the bonds of November, and--_Ichabod_.