“No,” he said, “I didn’t know it.”
“But you are. For instance, you don’t walk; you stalk. You do what novelists make their gloomy heroes do—you stride. It’s rather funny.”
“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 self-illumination, 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.
“You’re quite right,” he said, smiling easily and naturally; “I am unintentionally funny. And I really didn’t know it—didn’t suspect it—until this moment.”