I rather resented all my friends' way of talking to me, as if I were a
child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of. But I humoured
them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse
with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they
didn't suspect.

* * * * *

The next morning I was in the office of the _Independent_, visiting with
the literary editor, good old Dr. William Hayes Ward. He was a man of
eighty years ... a scholar in English and the Greek and Latin
classics....

Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had
read the whole of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ over again. In the Greek, of
course.

His abused eyes floated uneasily behind a double pair of lenses ... a
dissenting minister ... of the old school ... he seemed to me far more
youthful, more invigorating, than any of my other more youthful friends
in the literary and magazine world.

We talked and talked of poetry. He brought down a huge treatise on
English versification, translated from some German scholar's
life-research--to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney
Lanier--whom he had known--might have done with metrics, had he only
lived longer....

And "no ... no ... take my advice," he said, "don't go down to Eden."
There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought
from me the question--"why not? isn't Penton Baxter all right?"

"Oh, yes," in the same deprecatory tone,--"he's all right enough,
alone--but, together, you'd be like two balloons without ballast. He
might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess."

"Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?"

"Penton is always protesting about something or other,--always starting
fantastic schemes ... he's just finished with his Parnassus Palace
experiment, which brought him a lot of newspaper notoriety ... which is
to me distasteful, extremely distasteful ... yet Baxter," he added
hastily, "is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in
a given space of time than anyone else I know."

"I look on him as a great and wonderful man!"

"Mark my word, Mr. Gregory, you'll find yourself in some sort of mix-up
if you go down to Eden to live with him. You're both too mad and
inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood."

Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to
explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to
finish my