cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have
to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last
diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't
know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for
another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what
he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six
months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."

These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal
application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances
which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

* * * * *

I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I
wasn't present at its earliest stages.

I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of
nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a
rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his
inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come
to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been
going on in him.

The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work,
the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in
getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had
got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three
times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a
mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay
her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course,
was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never
been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do
about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how
he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about,
according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to
do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his
should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were
fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births,
marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of
them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally
hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he
wanted most awfully to do