In this short story, the narrator is a young boy who grows up on a southern plantation with absent parents. His loneliness causes him to create an imaginary friend named Gustave. Besides Gustave, the narrator has little companionship, and that continues even when he leaves the south to study at a his northern college. In the narrator's junior year, a new freshman comes to his college. This new student is named Gustave, and the narrator feels an "animal magnetism" towards him. The two men become fast friends, and they both travel to the South where they fall in love with the same girl. Due to frustration with the romantic rivalry, the narrator choses to allow Gustave to drown in a riverbed, and thus lives out the rest of his life with the guilt of a murderer.
Jun 1887
