some obsession by a demon of
indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these
familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he
knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of
them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them
into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often
contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.

The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the
collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had
befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted
with his kind for half a century of aesthetic consciousness, and now had
he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is
always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet
quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this
question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If
that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his
like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell
into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity
could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his
all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No,"
he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that
they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they
illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years,
society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating
no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which
were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level
of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of
which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock
foundations."

Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but
it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his
fancy--never imagination--began to play forward with the vivacity of
that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five.
If all this were true--and its truth shone the more distinctly from a
ground of potential dissent--was not there the stuff in the actual
conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now
that the first glow of his prime was past, might fa