for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously
betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil?
Why hadn't I thought of him before?

I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I
kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual
giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never
appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have
no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing
that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming
desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by
deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer
trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden
faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the
wisdom and mercy of God.

Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students;
he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and
contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his
small open wood fire. Phil is not destitute of taste, but he is by no
means an aesthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room
type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at
the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed
etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the
_Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with.
There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great
painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely
organized man.

His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a
bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not
found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves
whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or
suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal
notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan
warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books
than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his
copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first
chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an
indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to
w