d my sister who is rather
sentimental in her expressions, declares that the love I had for Amy
drained my nature dry. I think she is possibly right.

AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER.

The room was filled with a blue haze of tobacco smoke, and I had made
all of it, for Callender, it seemed to me, had foresworn most of his old
habits. He used not once to lie back languidly in a lounging-chair,
neither smoking, nor talking, nor drinking punch, when a chum came to
see him. Indeed, after the first effervescence of our meeting, natural
after a separation of four years, had subsided, I found such a different
Tom Callender from the one who had wrung my hand in parting on the deck
of the _Marius_, that I had indulged in sundry speculations, and I
studied him attentively beneath half-closed lids, as I apparently
watched the white rings from my cigar melt into the air.

Where, precisely, was the change? It was hard to say. The long, thin
figure was nerveless in its poses; the slender brown hand that had had
a characteristic vigor, lying listlessly open on the arm of his chair,
no longer looked capable of a tense, muscular grasp of life; the
slightly elongated oval of the face, with its complexion and hair like
the Japanese, was scarcely more hollowed or lined than before, but it
had lost that expression of expectation, which is one of the distinctive
marks of youth in the face. He had been politely attentive to my
experiences in Rio Janeiro, with which I have no doubt I bored him
unutterably, but when I asked about old friends, or social life, he
lapsed into the indifference of the man for whom such things no longer
exist: reminiscence did not interest him. I asked him about the plays
now on at the leading theatres--he had not seen them; about the new
prima donna--he had not heard her. Finally I broke a long silence by
picking up a book from the table at my side. "Worth reading?" I asked,
nibbling at it here and there. (It was a novel, with "Thirty-fifth
thousand" in larger letters than the title on the top of its yellow
cover.) As I spoke, a peculiar name, the name of a character on the leaf
I was just turning, brought suddenly to my mind one of the few women I
had known who bore it.

"By the way, Callender," I said animatedly, striking down the page that
had recalled her with my finger, "What has become of your little
blue-stocking friend? Don't you know--her book was just out when I
sailed,--'On Mount Latmos,'--'On Latmos