"Really. And do you find my movements comic?"

She was a trifle scared, now, but she laughed her breathless,
youthful laugh:

"You are really very dramatic--a perfect story-book man. But, you
know, sometimes they are funny when the author doesn't intend them
to be. . . . Please don't be angry."

Why the impudence of a model should have irritated him he was at a
loss to understand--unless there lurked under that impudence a trace
of unflattering truth.

As he sat looking at her, all at once, and in an unexpected flash of
selfillumination, he realized that habit had made of him an actor;
that for a while--a long while--a space of time he could not at the
moment conveniently compute--he had been playing a role merely
because he had become accustomed to it.

Disaster had cast him for a part. For a long while he had been that
part. Now he was still playing it from sheer force of habit. His
tragedy had really become only the shadow of a memory. Already he
had emerged from that shadow into the everyday outer world. But he
had forgotten that he still wore a somber makeup and costume which
in the sunshine might appear grotesque. No wonder the world thought
him funny.

Glancing up from a perplexed and chagrined meditation he caught her
eye--and found it penitent, troubled, and anxious.