is fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth
never goes without a scratched face.

But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few
who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make
their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young
Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted
that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our
future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way
would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner
in his rooms.

When the evening came J. was off on a journey for work and I went alone
to Fig-Tree House--the little old house, with a poor shabby London
apology of a fig-tree in front, on Milbank Street by the riverside,
which, with Henley's near Great College Street office round the corner,
has disappeared in the fury of municipal town-disfigurement. A popular
young man, in making his plans, cannot afford to reckon without his
friends. Four uninvited guests, all men, had arrived before me, a fifth
appeared as I did, and he was about the last man any of the party could
have wanted at that particular moment--a good and old and intimate
friend of Stevenson's, whose own name I am too discreet to mention but
to whom, for reasons I am also too discreet to explain, I may give that
of Michael Finsbury instead. Whoever has read _The Wrong Box_ knows that
Michael Finsbury enjoyed intervals of relaxation from work, knows also
the nature of the relaxation. I had struck him at the high tide of one
of these intervals. It was terribly awkward for everybody, especially
for me. I have got now to an age when I could face that sort of
awkwardness with equanimity, even with amusement. But I was young then,
I had not lived down my foolish shyness, and I would have run if, in my
embarrassment, I had had the courage,--would have run anyhow, I do
believe, if it had not been for Henley. He seized the situation and
mastered it. He had the reputation of being the most brutal of men, but
he showed a delicacy that few could have surpassed or equalled under
the circumstances. He simply forced me to forget the presence of the
objectionable Michael Finsbury, who at the other end of the table, I
learned afterwards, was overwhelming his neighbours with a worse
embarrassment than mine by finding me every bit as objectionable as I
found him, and saying so with a frankness it was not i