ht the age too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to
talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest.
He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
it marked a crisis--the complete, the acute consciousness of his
personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
evening. At this particular establishment the _Schoppen_ were very tall
and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy
tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour)
he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it _in extenso_; a
pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her,
wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too
fashionable for a person who cared only for serious society. She accused
him of having changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least in what manner
she had offended him? She used to think they were so much in
sympathy--he expressed her own ideas about everything so vividly. She
liked intellectual companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
much he would come and see her--as he used to do six months before--the
following evening; and however much she might have sinned or he might
have altered, she was at least al