For again it gave me time to ask why I was graded as I found myself. A man who knows he is a general and wakes up to see himself a private, with every one taking it for granted that he is a private and no more, would experience the same bewilderment. What had I done that such a situation could have come about? What had I been? How long was my knowledge of myself to depend on a group of shattered brain cells? I had not followed the conversation of Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair, even though I might have overheard it; but suddenly the lady glanced up with a clear, straightforward look from her myosotis eyes. "Mr. Soames, have you ever lived in Boston?" The husky, veiled voice was of that bantering quality for which the French word _gouailleur_ is the only descriptive term. In Paris it would have been called _une voix de Montmartre_, and as an expression of New York it might best be ascribed to Third Avenue. It was jolly, free-and-easy, common, and sympathetic, all at once. My instinct for self-defense urged me to say, "No," and I said it promptly. "Or Denver?" I said, "No," again, and for the same reason. I couldn’t be pinned down to details. If I said, "Yes," I should be asked when and where and how, and be driven to invention. "Were you ever in Salt Lake City?" A memory of a big gray building, with the Angel Moroni on the top of it, of broad, straight streets, of distant mountains, of a desert twisted and suffering, of a lake that at sunset glowed with the colors old artists burned into enamels—a memory of all this came to me, and I said, "Yes," I said it falteringly, wondering if it would commit me to anything. It committed me to nothing, so far as I could see, but a glance of Miss Blair’s heaven-colored eyes toward her friend, as though I had corroborated something she had said. She had forgotten for the moment that Drinkwater was blind, so that of this significant look I alone got the benefit. What it meant I, of course, didn’t know; I could only see it meant something. The obvious thing for it to mean was that Miss Blair knew more about me than I knew myself. While it was difficult to believe that, it nevertheless remained as part of the general experience of life which had not escaped me, that one rarely went among any large number of people without finding some one who knew who one was. That had happened to me many a time, especially on steamers, though I could no longer fix the occasions. I decided to cultivate Miss Blair and, if possible, get a clue from her. *CHAPTER V*