After having heard for so many years the reminiscences of my good friend about the old gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of them should step into actual living being before my eyes.  Yet so it happened.

I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont.  And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy hair, wearing thin.

“Shake hands with Tommy Vidal,” said Mr. Sims proudly.

If he had said, “Shake hands with Aristotle,” he couldn’t have spoken with greater pride.

This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual giant of whom I had heard a hundred times.  Tommy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often assured me, the brightest mind known since the age of Pericles.  He took the prize in Latin poetry absolutely “without opening a book.”  Latin to Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural gift, born in him.  In Latin he was “a whale.”  Indeed in everything.  He had passed his graduation examination with first class honours; “plastered.”  He had to be held in his seat, so it was recorded, while he wrote.

Tommy, it seemed, had just “blown in” to town that morning.  It was characteristic of Mr. Sims’s idea of the old gang that the only way in which any of them were supposed to enter a town was to “blow in.”

“When did you say you ‘blew in,’ Tommy?” he asked about half a dozen times during our lunch.  In reality, the reckless, devil-may-care fellow Vidal had “blown in” to bring his second daughter to a boarding school—­a thing no doubt contemplated months ahead.  But Mr. Sims insisted in regarding Tommy’s movements as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance.  He varied his question by asking “When do you expect to ‘blow out’ Tommy?” Tommy’s answers he forgot at once.

We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and anxious to get away.  Mr. Sims offered him cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he refused them.  It appeared that he had long since given up smoking.  It affected his eyes, he said.  The deferential waiter brought brandy and curacoa in long thin glasses.  But Mr. Vidal shook his head.  He hadn’t had a drink, he said, for twenty years.  He found it affected his hearing.  Coffee, too, he refused.  It affected, so it seemed, his sense of smell.  He sat beside us, ill at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses.  Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but has no great powers in conversation, would ask Tommy if he remembered how he acted as Antigone in the college play, and was “plastered” from the second act on.  Mr. Vidal had no recollection of it, but wondered if there was any good book-store in town where he could buy his daughter an Algebra.  He rose when he decently could and left us.  As Mr. Sims saw it, he “blew out.”

Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments.  He passed no word of censure on his departed friend.  But a week or so later he mentioned to me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had “turned into a kind of stiff.”  The vocabulary of Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation than the word “stiff.”  To be a “stiff” is the last form of degradation.