to say. But he had begun to doubt her seriously, and at last, stung by a little mistake of hers, he decided to hold himself aloof. This mistake was of no great importance, except to Nelson; she was so careless as not to observe until too late that he was standing beside his former friend, Mr. Thomas, and as she danced by them, she flashed to Platter one of those lovely little glances identically wistful. For an instant Nelson thought himself the recipient; then the fatuous expression of Platter and Claire's slight confusion were together all too enlightening.
Immediately Nelson became more completely than ever a mechanism. That is to say, of course, he was like any other human being under the impulsion of strong feelings, a stoked engine compelled to motion. The metal engine will move as long as the fuel lasts; the engine of human appearance will move as long as the feeling lasts; and the difference is that the metal engine is (except for accident) guided by human intelligence while the human engine is not. Nevertheless, just as rails are provided for the metal engine, so are there tracks that the human engine must follow—tracks thus travelled for thousands of years by the mechanical humans stoked by common emotions. To Nelson it appeared that of his own
