But, you know, it is the proper thing, if you wear a mask, to have a sad face behind it. Eustace sometimes felt sad, and sometimes fatigued. He had worked a little to make his reputation, but it was often hard labour to live up to it. His profession of a buffoon sometimes exhausted him, but he could no longer dare to be like others. The self-conscious live to gratify the changing expectations of their world, and Eustace had educated himself into a self-consciousness that was almost a disease. And, then, there was his place in the pages of _Vanity Fair_ to be won. He put that in front of him as his aim in life, and became daily more and more whimsical. Nevertheless, he did one prosaic thing. He fell in love with Winifred Ames, and could not help showing it. As the malady increased upon him his reputation began to suffer eclipse, for he relapsed into sentiment, and even allowed his eyes to grow large and lover-like. He ceased to worry people, and so began to bore them--a much more dangerous thing. For a moment he even ran the fearful risk of becoming wholly natural, dropping his mask, and showing himself as he really was, a rather dull, quite normal young man, with the usual notions about the usual things, the usual bias towards the usual vices, the usual disinclination to do the usual duties of life. He ran a risk, but Winifred saved him, and restored him to his fantasies this evening of the ball in Carlton House Terrace. It was an ordinary ball, and therefore Eustace appeared to receive his guests in fancy dress, wearing a powdered wig and a George IV. Court costume. This absurdity was a mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon’s reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then took her to a scarlet nook, apparently devised to hold only one person, but into which they gently squeezed, not without difficulty. She gazed at him with her big brown eyes, that were at the same time honest and fanciful. Then she said: “You have taken an unfair advantage of us all to-night, Mr. Lane.” “Havel? How?” “By retreating into the picturesque clothes of another age. All the men here must hate you.” “No; they only laugh at me.” She was silent a moment. Then she said: “What is it in you that makes you enjoy that which the rest of us are afraid of?” “And that is----” “Being laughed at. Laughter, you know, is the great world’s cat-o’-nine-tails. We fear it as little boys fear the birch on a winter’s morning at school.” Eustace smiled uneasily. “Do you laugh at me?” he asked. “I have. You surely don’t mind.”