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A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. "No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry.

She calls him 'brother, whose eyes cannot look at her without telling their story of wicked love. She walks on the edge of a precipice self-deceived. Were I to abandon her she might fall. My affection is her only safeguard; and by winning her to myself I shall snatch her from the pit of hell." It was the truth he was telling her.

"But surely not." "Well ... can't be positive till I know you better.... I'm afraid you've got a tendency to overestimate the gullibility of people in general. It's either that, or.... No: I don't believe you're intentionally hypocritical, or self-deceived, either." "But I don't understand...."

I asseverate that these persons were and are self-deceived, or talking idly or repeating what they have heard from others or merely lying. Commodus never so far debased himself as to take his stand in the arena of the Colosseum on the morning of a public spectacle with all Rome looking on; still less did he ever disgrace himself by actually killing beasts in full sight of the whole populace.

Go to the benighted woman. Her's is a melancholy case. Satan has a secure footing in her heart, and defeats every effort and every motive that I have brought to bear against it. May you be more fortunate may her self-deceived and hardened spirit melt before the force and earnestness of your appeals!" I ventured for a second time on sacred and interdicted ground, and visited the cottage.

"Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or moved with conceit, individually or in the bulk the Spirit overhead will look humorously malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter.

But some of us are destined to a reaction, almost as strong as the obsession. The religionists will think they lead it. They will be self-deceived. Moving picture nausea is already taking hold of numberless people, even when they are in the purely pagan mood.

And, tricked by our own early dream And need of solace, we grew self-deceived, Our making soon our maker did we dream, And what we had imagined we believed. Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing, Uncompromising rude reality Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning, Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

For one brief and terrible moment his whole memory was restored to him and he knew that his madness was only madness, and nothing more, and that it seized him in the same way, week by week, through the months and the years, leaving him thus on the stroke of twelve each Wednesday night, a broken, miserable, self-deceived man.

And with a frankness simply Gallic in its freedom from those thought-conventions with which so many people like to deceive themselves she deals with human nature on what she considers are its merits. The result is sometimes very disconcerting to the pompous and all the rest of the host of self-deceived, but usually amusing to herself and often profitable to her friends.