litted through my mind and poised on my
conscience.

I hope that I and those other boys had long ago ceased from recurring to
him in nightmares. Cordial though the hand was that I offered him, and
highly civilised my whole demeanour, he seemed afraid that at any moment
I might begin to dance around him, shooting out my lips at him and
calling him Seven-Sisters Brown or something of that kind. It was only
after constant meetings at second nights, and innumerable entr'acte
talks about the future of the drama, that he began to trust me. In
course of time we formed the habit of walking home together as far as
Cumberland Place, at which point our ways diverged. I gathered that he
was still living with his parents, but he did not tell me where, for
they had not, as I learned by reference to the Red Book, moved from
Ladbroke Crescent.

I found his company restful rather than inspiring. His days were
spent in clerkship at one of the smaller Government Offices, his
evenings--except when there was a second night--in reading and writing.
He did not seem to know much, or to wish to know more, about life. Books
and plays, first editions and second nights, were what he cared for. On
matters of religion and ethics he was as little keen as he seemed to be
on human character in the raw; so that (though I had already suspected
him of writing, or meaning to write, a play) my eyebrows did rise when
he told me he meant to write a play about Savonarola.

He made me understand, however, that it was rather the name than the
man that had first attracted him. He said that the name was in itself a
great incentive to blank-verse. He uttered it to me slowly, in a voice
so much deeper than his usual voice, that I nearly laughed. For the
actual bearer of the name he had no hero-worship, and said it was by a
mere accident that he had chosen him as central figure. He had
thought of writing a tragedy about Sardanapalus; but the volume of the
"Encyclopedia Britannica" in which he was going to look up the main
facts about Sardanapalus happened to open at Savonarola. Hence a sudden
and complete peripety in the student's mind. He told me he had read the
Encyclopedia's article carefully, and had dipped into one or two of
the books there mentioned as authorities. He seemed almost to wish he
hadn't. 'Facts get in one's way so,' he complained. 'History is one
thing, drama is another. Aristotle said drama was more philosophic than
history because it showed us