get-up for the _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_. Bob's own disguises
rarely got into print, but in Will Low's _Chronicle of Friendships_
there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of
brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the
beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a
huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for
engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so
that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner
to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion
was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct
accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights,
so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without
it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less
symbolic; in them he was dressed for the role of middle age which he,
who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew
him. It was a role to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about
his health--his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before
he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a
sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible
sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love
of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote
anything in which it is not felt.

But Henley loved the visible sign for itself--the romance was actually
in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering
above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it
gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping.
He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing--he was the
modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his
stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with
their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was
Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to
put down his stories himself--he would not have written a word for
publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have
been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always
consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to
live. He had not the talent for combining,