snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
and polluted ass." (Cough, 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