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Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real.

"Instinct advances with a mechanical certainty, hence comes its unconscious character. It knows nothing either of ends, or of the means of attaining them: it implies no comparison, judgment, or choice." This is assumption. What is certain is that instinct does not betray signs of self-consciousness as to its own knowledge.

"Madame Récamier, still young, and very handsome, and with an expression of naïveté in her charming countenance, made the impression on me of being a young lady in love, carefully watched over by too severe a duenna, her timid, gentle manner contrasted so strongly with the somewhat too masculine self-consciousness of her companion.

"After all, does it matter much? If I had anything else to gain. Suppose I had any hope of marriage, for instance " He said it playfully. Eve turned her eyes away, but gave no other sign of self-consciousness. "I have no such hope. I have seen too much of marriage in poverty." "So have I," said his companion, with quiet emphasis.

One is government by terror and obedience, the other is government based on such a highly developed system of information, analysis, and self-consciousness that "the knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state" is evident to all men.

"You've only got to open your mouth, and you'd talk anybody into the middle of next week." "Mother!" Hilda mildly reproved. She was convinced now that Mr. Cannon had come on purpose to clinch the affair. He laughed appreciatively. "But really! Seriously!" he insisted. And Mrs. Lessways, straightening her face, said, with slight self-consciousness: "Oh, I think it's worth while considering!"

She guessed him to be a well- mannered young clerk in some wholesale warehouse, existing and amusing himself as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a holiday of about two weeks in the year. He was aware, of course, of his good looks, but with the shy self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not the blatant complacency of the Latin or Semite.

"I'm going into the country, and I haven't half a second to spare. I'm so sorry." He had held his place. "You've got to give me five minutes. You've got to," and something in his eyes had made her take hold of her impatience. "You don't know what you're doing to me," he had said, with no sign of his usual style and self-consciousness, but simply, like a man who had sat in the dark and suffered.

She smiled at the debonair boy with as agreeable a self-consciousness as though she had been a young girl. 'But certainly, if monsieur desired. The pleasure was for her. Again an interchange of bows and smiles, sympathetically repeated by the interested young waiter.

So, at least, it seemed to the two who, in their eagerness, were leaving out of their calculation the most important factor in the case: Ivan's unconquerable shyness: his excessive modesty: the nervous self-consciousness never yet tried in so keen a way. But to-night Ivan was wrapped in a dream. A golden mist of hope gratified, ideals realized, ambition met, hid from him every ugly reality.