CHAPTER XXXIV.
in which the cosmopolitan tells the story of the gentleman-madman.
"Charlemont was a young merchant of French
descent, living in St. Louis—a man not deficient in
mind, and possessed of that sterling and captivating
kindliness, seldom in perfection seen but in youthful
bachelors, united at times to a remarkable sort of gracefully devil-may-care and witty good-humor. Of course, he was admired by everybody, and loved, as only mankind can love, by not a few. But in his twenty-ninth year a change came over him. Like one whose hair turns
gray in a night, so in a day Charlemont turned from
affable to morose. His acquaintances were passed without greeting; while, as for his confidential friends, them he pointedly, unscrupulously, and with a kind of fierceness, cut dead.
"One, provoked by such conduct, would fain have resented it with words as disdainful; while another, shocked by the change, and, in concern for a friend, magnanimously overlooking affronts, implored to know what sudden, secret grief had distempered him. But
