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Dr. August Moehrlein was a staunch advocate of the advantage of the kommers as an adjunct to every thoroughly organized university. If he could not gather others for a kommers, he would hold a kommers all by himself, or perchance with the barkeeper. Needless to say that the name of Moehrlein was attached to many valuable and plausible theories which America received as the last word on the subject treated; needless to tell you that the various gods of India had been identified with the sun, moon, and more important stars, and that it was conclusively shown that the Sanskrit romancers had written their tales by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Would that this accomplishment of the ancients had not gone from us and that the moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun, but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual effort. In his search for the suggestions of the tale of Nala, he had acquired a paunch very like a bag. Mrs. Moehrlein was accustomed to shrink from the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy, middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the clouds and the sea.

It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled cabbage.

“Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into the box; thirty years since we have been man and–woman.”

“Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor young Hilsenhoff.”

She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret and this did not escape the doctor.

“One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of Ganesha and Vishnu, when a goddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole repository of the secret of his whereabouts–that the mutton-headed police might not interfere with the success of his experiment by preventing what they might think practically suicide–you said to let him stay.”

“I was twenty and he thirty,” mused the woman. “Poor young Hilsenhoff.”

“Young! I was twenty-three–and a man.”

“Dead or alive, he is young Hilsenhoff to me. He was thirty when last I saw him.”