of him as the Jimmie whose youth had shone with blinding radiance.

His constancy to Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic
quality. The others in the office drifted gradually out of his life.
Some of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump
or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and
stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one
interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.

"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.

But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote. He
gets back to that when he is with us."

I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not
sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're
right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked
him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He
had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his
finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said
Duncan, with great heat.

But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all
giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack,
he did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had
prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New York
manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.

I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a gay
cockade. "That's a corking title," Jimmie had said, and had written it