Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves
maintaining two establishments. So, let us get on!”

“Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body, just as that first Glaum once took over my body; and I will take over all your body’s imbroglios, even with your mistress,—who can hardly be more tasking to get along with than are the seven official wives and the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines I am getting rid of.”

“You,” Gerald said, morosely, “do not know Evelyn Townsend.”

“I trust,” the Sylan stated, more gallantly, “to have that privilege to-morrow.”

It was in this way the bargain was struck. And then the Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes did what was requisite.

3. Two Geralds

Two Geralds

THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated, did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended, no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library, stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat, and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.

T

T

Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves there was no visual difference whatever.

One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and, fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with every available moment given 
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