an observer, a recorder. I admit that it's an extraordinary coincidence.
But you must see--"

"I see the whole thing," said Soames, quietly. And he added, with a
touch of his old manner, but with more dignity than I had ever known in
him, "Parlons d'autre chose."

I accepted that suggestion very promptly. I returned straight to the
more immediate future. I spent most of the long evening in renewed
appeals to Soames to come away and seek refuge somewhere. I
remember saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him,
the supposed "stauri" had better have at least a happy ending. Soames
repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn.

"In life and in art," he said, "all that matters is an INEVITABLE
ending."

"But," I urged more hopefully than I felt, "an ending that can be
avoided ISN'T inevitable."

"You aren't an artist," he rasped. "And you're so hopelessly not an
artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem
true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it up.
You're a miserable bungler. And it's like my luck."

I protested that the miserable bungler was not I, was not going to be
I, but T. K. Nupton; and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick of
which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong:
he had quite physically cowered. But I wondered why--and now I
guessed with a cold throb just why--he stared so past me. The bringer of