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
