ooking
about for my bag and trunk.

I still protested weakly, but in vain. His affection was so overwhelming
and tender that it made me weak. I allowed him to help me get my things
together. Then he paid the bill, a small one, and on the way to the
hotel insisted on forcing a roll of bills on me, all that he had with
him. I was compelled at once, that same day or the next, to indulge in a
suit, hat, shoes, underwear, all that I needed. A bedroom adjoining his
suite at the hotel was taken, and for two days I lived there, later
accompanying him in his car to a famous sanitarium in Westchester, one
in charge of an old friend of his, a well-known ex-wrestler whose fame
for this sort of work was great. Here I was booked for six weeks, all
expenses paid, until I should "be on my feet again," as he expressed it.
Then he left, only to visit and revisit me until I returned to the city,
fairly well restored in nerves if not in health.

But could one ever forget the mingled sadness and fervor of his original
appeal, the actual distress written in his face, the unlimited generosity
of his mood and deed as well as his unmerited self-denunciation? One
pictures such tenderness and concern as existing between parents and
children, but rarely between brothers. Here he was evincing the same
thing, as soft as love itself, and he a man of years and some affairs
and I an irritable, distrait and peevish soul.

Take note, ye men of satire and spleen. All men are not selfish or hard.

The final phase of course related to his untimely end. He was not quite
fifty-five when he died, and with a slightly more rugged quality of mind
he might have lasted to seventy. It was due really to the failure of his
firm (internal dissensions and rivalries, in no way due to him, however,
as I have been told) and what he foolishly deemed to be the end of his
financial and social glory. His was one of those simple, confiding,
non-hardy dispositions, warm and colorful but intensely sensitive,
easily and even fatally chilled by the icy blasts of human difficulty,
however slight. You have no doubt seen some animals, cats, dogs, birds,
of an especially affectionate nature, which when translated to a strange
or unfriendly climate soon droop and die. They have no spiritual
resources wherewith to contemplate what they do not understand or know.
Now his friends would leave him. Now that bright world of which he had
been a part would know him no more. It was pathetic,