he used his left arm too awkwardly for the event not to have had a recent date.  Had it anything to do with his melancholy?  Here was a topic for my vagabond imagination, and endless were the romances woven by it during my silent dinner.  For the reader must be told of one peculiarity in me, because to it much of the strange complications of my story are due; complications into which a mind less active in weaving imaginary hypotheses to interpret casual and trifling facts would never have been drawn.  From my childhood I have been the victim of my constructive imagination, which has led me into many mistakes and some scrapes; because, instead of contenting myself with plain, obvious evidence, I have allowed myself to frame hypothetical interpretations, which, to acts simple in themselves, and explicable on ordinary motives, render the simple-seeming acts portentous.  With bitter pangs of self-reproach I have at times discovered that a long and plausible history constructed by me, relating to personal friends, has crumpled into a ruin of absurdity, by the disclosure of the primary misconception on which the whole history was based.  I have gone, let us say, on the supposition that two people were secretly lovers; on this supposition my imagination has constructed a whole scheme to explain certain acts, and one fine day I have discovered indubitably that the supposed lovers were not lovers, but confidants of their passions in other directions, and, of course, all my conjectures have been utterly false.  The secret flush of shame at failure has not, however, prevented my falling into similar mistakes immediately after.

When, therefore, I hereafter speak of my “constructive imagination,” the reader will know to what I am alluding.  It was already busy with Bourgonef.  To it must be added that vague repulsion, previously mentioned.  This feeling abated on the second day; but, although lessened, it remained powerful enough to prevent my speaking to him.  Whether it would have continued to abate until it disappeared, as such antipathies often disappear, under the familiarities of prolonged intercourse, without any immediate appeal to my amour propre, I know not; but every reflective mind, conscious of being accessible to antipathies, will remember that one certain method of stifling them is for the object to make some appeal to our interest or our vanity:  in the engagement of these more powerful feelings, the antipathy is quickly strangled.  At any rate it is so in my case, and was so now.

On the third day, the conversation at table happening to turn, as it often turned, upon St. Sebald’s Church, a young Frenchman, who was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound.  In the midst of this triumphant exposition the irritated vanity of the Frenchman could do nothing to regain