THE sluggishness, the dull, dead-and-alive feeling, of which Elias had complained to his uncle, seemed to be tightening its hold upon him. From morning to-night, each day, he went about in a state of profound apathy. His customary occupations had lost their power to interest him. His painting he pursued listlessly, getting no pleasure from it, and producing wretched stuff. He would sit at his studio window for hours at a stretch, moping; trying to think of something to do that would cause him a little sensation; wondering what the matter with himself could be; pitying himself from the bottom of his heart. He craved excitement as the toper craves his grog. But there were grog-shops on every corner; he knew of no excitement-shop. The entire emotional side of his nature appeared to have become congealed and unsusceptible. Even his five bodily senses had lost their edge. His food, unless he deluged it with salt and pepper, was vapid, flavorless. The cold water with which he bathed in the morning, felt lukewarm to his skin. Whatsoever his eye looked upon, straightway forfeited all its beauty, all its suggestiveness. He fancied he would enjoy a horse-whipping. It would stir him up, and start his blood to circulating. Already his memory of Christine had begun to grow dim and shadowy, like the memory of a person known only in a dream. His whole acquaintance with her, from first to last, as he reviewed it, seemed unreal and dream-like. As a matter of curiosity, he tried now and then to call up her face and figure; with none but the vaguest, meagerest results. She had gone quite out of his life, and was fading rapidly quite out of his thought. When Sunday came, and the rabbi reminded him of their engagement to dine at the Kochs', he experienced something almost like a distinct and positive pleasure. These people, at least, with their high-pitched voices and peculiar manners, would afford him a small measure of amusement. He hoped Miss Tillie would be there. Her aggressive crudity, which, a few weeks ago, would have cut him like a knife, would now simply have the effect of an agreeable irritant. His hope in this respect was not disappointed. The dinner party consisted of precisely the same lot of people whom he had met the other evening, without an addition or a subtraction. When he and the rabbi arrived, they were all assembled in the parlor, forming the circumference of a circle, of which Lester, sprawling upon the carpet, and smiling a smile of beatific inanition, was the center. They were in ecstasies of admiration, which, evidently, they expected the new-comers to share. It was a monstrously fat baby, without any features to speak of; and it had a horrid red eruption all over one side of its face. Yet, very gravely, Mr. Koch asked, “Isn't that the handsomest baby you ever saw, Mr. Bacharach? Wouldn't you like to paint his portrait?” And Elias felt constrained to reply that it was, and that he would.