as being kept a prisoner in the corner into
which he had been driven on his arrival, and he could not understand why
until, breaking loose, he discovered Henley in the next room. Our alarm
was not surprising, knowing as we did what a valiant fighter Crane was
himself: as a socialist waving the red flag in the face of the world, as
an artist forever rushing into the papers to defend his theories of art,
as a man refusing to see his glory in passing by an offence. Not very
long before, J. had exasperated him in print, by the honest expression
of an opinion he did not happen to like, into threats of a big stick
ready for attack the next time J. ventured upon his walks abroad. I need
not add that J. did not bother to stay at home, that the big stick never
materialized, that, though this was only the first of many fights
between the two, Walter Crane was our friend to the end. But the little
episode gives the true spirit of the Nineties.

I can still see Beardsley dodging from group to group to escape Henley,
for he never recovered from the fright of the first encounter. He told
me the story at the time. He had gone, by special appointment, to call
on Henley, under his arm the little portfolio he was rarely without in
those early days, ready and enchanted as he always was to show his
drawings to anybody willing to look at them. As he went up the two
flights of stairs to Henley's Great College Street rooms, he heard a
voice, loud, angry, terrifying; at the top, through an open door, he saw
a youth standing in the middle of the room listening in abject terror to
a large red man at a desk whom he knew instinctively to be Henley;--one
glance, and he turned and fled, down the stairs, into the street, the
little portfolio under his arm, his pace never slackening until he got
well beyond the Houses of Parliament, through the Horse Guards into the
Park.

Other friends would not come at all on Thursday because of Henley, just
as later more than one stayed away altogether because of Whistler. I was
wretchedly nervous when they did come and brave a face-to-face meeting.
Henley was not the sort of man to shirk a fight in the open. The
principal reason for his unpopularity was just that habit of his of
saying what he thought no matter where or when or to whom. He did not
spare his friends, for he would not have kept them as friends had they
not held some opinions worth his attacking, and they understood and
respected him for it. Moreove