I could see the thing playing itself, as I walked about
the room (for this time I was the person who was too excited to sit
still), and that was enough to make one sanguine. I became as
enthusiastic about it as though the work were mine (which it never,
never would or could have been), yet I was unable to suggest a single
improvement, or to have so much as a finger-tip in the pie. Nor could I
afterwards account for its invariable reception at the hands of
managers, whose ways were then unknown to me. That night we talked only
of one kind of reception. We were still talking when the sun came
slanting up the river to my windows; you could hardly see them for
tobacco-smoke, and we had emptied a bottle of whisky to the success of
Pharazyn's immortal play.

[Illustration: "HIS MANUSCRIPT RAGGED BUT UNREAD."]

"Oh, those nights--those nights once in a way! God forgive me, but I'd
sacrifice many things to be young again and feel clever, and to know the
man who would sit up all night with me to rule the world over a bottle
of honest grog. In the pale light of subsequent revelations I ought,
perhaps, to recall such a night, with that particular companion,
silently and in spiritual ashes. But it is ridiculous, in my opinion, to
fit some sort of consequence to every little insulated act; nor will I
ever admit that poor Pharazyn's ultimate failing was in any appreciable
degree promoted or prepared for by those our youthful full-souled
orgies. I know very well that afterwards, when his life was spent in
waylaying those aforesaid managers, in cold passages, on stage
doorsteps, or, in desperation, under the public portico on the street;
and when a hundred snubs and subterfuges would culminate in the return
of his manuscript, ragged but unread: I know, and I knew then, that the
wreck who would dodge me in Fleet Street, or cut me in the Strand, had
taken to his glass more seriously and more steadily than a man should.
But I am not sure that it matters much--_much_, you understand me--when
that man's heart is broken.

* * * * *

"The last words I was ever to exchange with my poor old friend keep
ringing in my head to this day, whenever I think of him; and I can
repeat them every one. It was some few years after our intimacy had
ceased, and when I only knew that he had degenerated into a Fleet Street
loafer of the most dilapidated type, that I caught sight of him one day
outside a theatre. It was the th