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 Top,'--what was it?"
A dark flush burnt its way up to the black, straight hair.
"She is--dead," Callender replied, with a hopeless pause before the hopeless word.
"Dead!" I echoed, unable to associate the idea of death with the incarnation of life that I remembered.
Callender did not reply. He rose, with the slight limp so familiar to me in the past, but which I noticed now as if I had never seen it before, and went to a desk at the far end of the spacious room. I smoked on meditatively. It was odd, I thought, that chance had guided me straight as an arrow, to the cause of the change in my friend. One might have known, though, that he, the misogynist of our class, would have come to grief, sooner or later, over a woman. They always end by that.