“Genealogy! What hay! What sawdust! Aren’t there enough live people to take an interest in, without grubbing up dead ones from tombstones and town clerks’ records? Berkeley must be a regular old bachelor antiquary by this time, with all human sympathy dried out of him. No, I wouldn’t change with him. Would we, fatty?” he said, appealing to a small offspring of uncertain sex which had just toddled out the door and across the gangway to kiss its papa good-night.
I took leave of Armstrong and his interesting family with a sense of increased liking. His worldliness, good nature, and simple little enthusiasms and self-satisfactions had somehow kept him young, and he seemed quite the old Armstrong of college days. I afterward learned that the excellent fellow had just finished his law studies, and was preparing to enter upon practice, when his father’s health failed, forcing him to give up his parish, and leaving a number of younger brothers and sisters partly dependent on Armstrong. He had accordingly taken the first situation that promised a fair salary, and, having got started upon the work of teaching, had been unable to let go until it was too late; had, indeed, got deeper and deeper in, by falling in love and impulsively marrying at the first opportunity, and finally setting up for himself at the Pestalozzian Institute. Poor fellow! Good fellow! Amico mio, non della fortuna.
My next call was upon Clay, who had rooms in the Babel building in New York, and was reported to be something of a Bohemian. He received me in a smoking jacket and slippers. He had grown a full beard which hid his finely cut features. His black eyes had the old fire, but his skin was sallower, and I thought that his manner had a touch of listlessness mingled with irritability and defiance. He was glad to see me; but inclined to be at first, not precisely distant, yet by no means confidential. After awhile, however, he thawed out and became more like the Clay whom I remembered—our college genius, the brilliant, the admired, in those days of eager hero-worship. I told him of my visits to Berkeley and Armstrong.
“Berkeley I see now and then in town,” said Clay. “It was rather queer of him to turn parson, but I guess he doesn’t let his theology bother him much. He has a really superior collection of etchings, I am told. Armstrong I haven’t seen for years. I knew he was a pedagogue somewhere in Connecticut.”
“Don’t you ever go to the class reunions?” I asked.
“Class reunions? Well, hardly.”
“I should think you would; you are so near New Haven.”
“How charmingly provincial you are—you Southern chaps! Don’t you know that, to a man who lives in New York, nothing is near? Besides, as to my classmates at old Yale and all that, I would go round a corner to avoid meeting most of them.”
I expressed myself as duly shocked by this sentiment, and presently I inquired: