biographical complement, just so much personal detail as may point the
significance of the self-revelation here made.

When first I knew him, Ryecroft had reached his fortieth year; for twenty
years he had lived by the pen. He was a struggling man, beset by poverty
and other circumstances very unpropitious to mental work. Many forms of
literature had he tried; in none had he been conspicuously successful;
yet now and then he had managed to earn a little more money than his
actual needs demanded, and thus was enabled to see something of foreign
countries. Naturally a man of independent and rather scornful outlook,
he had suffered much from defeated ambition, from disillusions of many
kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time
of which I am speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind
and temper so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with
him, one did not know but that he led a calm, contented life. Only after
several years of friendship was I able to form a just idea of what the
man had gone through, or of his actual existence. Little by little
Ryecroft had subdued himself to a modestly industrious routine. He did a
great deal of mere hack-work; he reviewed, he translated, he wrote
articles; at long intervals a volume appeared under his name. There were
times, I have no doubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he
suffered in health, and probably as much from moral as from physical over-
strain; but, on the whole, he earned his living very much as other men
do, taking the day's toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling
over it.

Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious and poor.
In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies, and
evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future. The thought of
dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps the only boast I