Nothing more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't be there to
put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the
alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had
gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the
art of portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an
allowance had threatened to withdraw it if he should, under
specious pretexts, turn for superior truth to Paris--Paris being
somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of evil, the abyss. I
deplored this prejudice at the time, and the deep injury of it was
now visible--first in the fact that it hadn't saved the poor boy,
who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs,
and second in the greater break with London to which the event
condemned me. I'm afraid that what was uppermost in my mind during
several anxious weeks was the sense that if we had only been in
Paris I might have run over to see Corvick. This was actually out
of the question from every point of view: my brother, whose
recovery gave us both plenty to do, was ill for three months,
during which I never left him and at the end of which we had to
face the absolute prohibition of a return to England. The
consideration of climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to
meet it alone. I took him to Meran and there spent the summer with
him, trying to show him by example how to get back to work and
nursing a rage of another sort that I tried NOT to show him.

The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so
strangely interlaced that, taken together--which was how I had to