“I confess that the name has been a failure.  I took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a pleasant impression.  It is not a mere invention, but a compound of the words smile and eyelash.  A smile suggests good humor; eyelashes soften the expression and are the only features that never blemish a face.  Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer and propitiate.  Yet it exasperates.  It is really very odd that it should have that effect, unless it is that it raises expectations which I am unable to satisfy.”

Miss Wilson looked at him doubtfully.  He remained perfectly grave.  There was a pause.  Then, as if she had made up her mind to be offended, she said, “Good-morning,” shortly.

“Good-morning, Miss Wilson.  The son of a millionaire, like the son of a king, is seldom free from mental disease.  I am just mad enough to be a mountebank.  If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him.  Whether you ask me to forget myself for a moment, or to remember myself for a moment, I reply that I am the son of my father, and cannot.  With my egotism, my charlatanry, my tongue, and my habit of having my own way, I am fit for no calling but that of saviour of mankind—­just of the sort they like.”  After an impressive pause he turned slowly and left the room.

“I wonder,” he said, as he crossed the landing, “whether, by judiciously losing my way, I can catch a glimpse of that girl who is like a golden idol?”

Downstairs, on his way to the door, he saw Agatha coming towards him, occupied with a book which she was tossing up to the ceiling and catching.  Her melancholy expression, habitual in her lonely moments, showed that she was not amusing herself, but giving vent to her restlessness.  As her gaze travelled upward, following the flight of the volume, it was arrested by Smilash.  The book fell to the floor.  He picked it up and handed it to her, saying: 

“And, in good time, here is the golden idol!”

“What?” said Agatha, confused.

“I call you the golden idol,” he said.  “When we are apart I always imagine your face as a face of gold, with eyes and teeth of bdellium, or chalcedony, or agate, or any wonderful unknown stones of appropriate colors.”

Agatha, witless and dumb, could only look down deprecatingly.

“You think you ought to be angry with me, and you do not know exactly how to make me feel that you are so.  Is that it?”

“No.  Quite the contrary.  At least—­I mean that you are wrong.  I am the most commonplace person you can imagine—­if you only knew.  No matter what I may look, I mean.”

“How do you know that you are commonplace?”

“Of course I know,” said Agatha, her eyes wandering uneasily.

“Of course you do not know; you cannot see yourself as others see you.  For instance, you have never thought of yourself as a golden idol.”

“But that is absurd.  You are quite mistaken about me.”