“No,” he said, with an effort. Then: “Are you laughing to-night?” “No. You have done an absurd thing, of course, but it happens to be becoming. You look--well, pretty--yes, that’s the word--in your wig. Many men are ugly in their own hair. And, after all, what would life be without its absurdities? Probably you are right to enjoy being laughed at.” Eustace, who had seriously meditated putting off his mask forever that night, began to change his mind. The sentence, “Many men are ugly in their own hair,” dwelt with him, and he felt fortified in his powdered wig. What if he took it off, and henceforth Winifred found him ugly? Does not the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not buy our fate at the costumier’s? “Just tell me one thing,” Winifred went on. “Are you natural?” “Natural?” he hesitated. “Yes; I think you must be. You’ve got a whimsical nature.” “I suppose so.” He thought of his journey with his father years ago, and added: “I wish I hadn’t.” “Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to you.” “Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow life.” “What’s that?” “Real and earnest.” And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead poet and his own secret psalm. And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose to believe his own hair. They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception. In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that Bluebeard’s Chamber, the honeymoon. II.