"Well, Mark educated me. I went to a public school and to
Cambridge, and I became his secretary. Well, much more than his
secretary as your friend Beverley perhaps has told you: his land
agent, his financial adviser, his courier, his--but this most of
all--his audience. Mark could never live alone. There must
always be somebody to listen to him. I think in his heart he
hoped I should be his Boswell. He told me one day that he had
made me his literary executor--poor devil. And he used to write
me the absurdest long letters when I was away from him, letters
which I read once and then tore up. The futility of the man!

"It was three years ago that Philip got into trouble. He had
been hurried through a cheap grammar school and into a London
office, and discovered there that there was not much fun to be
got in this world on two pounds a week. I had a frantic letter
from him one day, saying that he must have a hundred at once, or
he would be ruined, and I went to Mark for the money. Only to
borrow it, you understand; he gave me a good salary and I could
have paid it back in three months. But no. He saw nothing for
himself in it, I suppose; no applause, no admiration. Philip's
gratitude would be to me, not to him. I begged, I threatened, we
argued; and while we were arguing, Philip was arrested. It
killed my mother--he was always her favourite--but Mark, as
usual, got his satisfaction out of it. He preened himself on his
judgment of character in having chosen me and not Philip twelve
years before!

"Later on I apologized to Mark for the reckless things I had said
to him, and he played the part of a magnanimous gentleman with