couple of lines that had
occurred to him perhaps at the theatre, and were jotted hastily on the
edge of a programme, was all that a whole week produced. And even these
would have been lost through his carelessness but for me.

The days were generally divided between headache and sleep; the nights
between the theatre and drink. I regretted it; and this life that was
being wasted, poured out in uselessness, within my sight oppressed me.
I should hardly have noticed it with another man, but I knew that this
one had been planned for higher things.

I used to try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at
any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read
sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by drink,
had almost forgotten.

"Are they not splendid?" I would say; "and you are the author! You are
their parent, Howard! Think! Any man could lead the life you are
leading! not one in a thousand could produce these lines!"

Howard would look at me suspiciously with heavy eyes.

"Are you sure I wrote that? I don't think I remember it!"

What a crime!

"I know you did," I would answer, and then urge him to give every day
and night in the week, if he liked, to pleasure except one--"let one be
sacred to work!"

"And just think," he would answer, lazily, "if I were dying, how those
days and nights wasted would come and stare me in the face!"

"Wasted! in the building of such lines as these?"

"But what's the good of them when they are built? They don't make me
enjoy life!"

And he pursued his own path and I could not stop him. I hoped and
thought he would get tired after a time of the Paris halls and drunken
nights and sick headaches, but I waited in vain. He had gradually got
intimate with the back as well as the front of the scenes, and this I
liked less than anything. The state of Howard's finances, too, threw an
extra weight of responsibility on me, for he must have trodden a
straighter road, and perhaps he would have worked more if he had had
less money. And the money--his superfluous cash--came generally from
me. His own allowance was small; just enough to keep him and no more.
Gifts, under the name of loans, from me supplied all extras, and filled
all deficiencies and gaps. What could I answer when he used to say,
"Dear old boy! let me have another twenty!" And yet I knew it was
handing him the razor to cut his throat. I hoped the sight of another
fellow working a