; and once when I climbed up to his garret
(it was literally that), he would not answer me, though I could smell
his pipe through the key-hole, in which he had turned the key. Yet he
was perfectly friendly whenever we did meet. He said he was working very
hard, and indeed I could imagine it; his personal appearance, which he
had never cherished, being even untidier, and I am obliged to add
seedier, than of old. He continued to send me odd magazines in which his
stuff happened to appear, or occasionally a proof for one's opinion and
suggestions; we had done this to each other all along; but either I did
not think about it, or somehow he led me to suppose that his things were
more or less hot from the pen, whereas many of mine had been written a
twelvemonth before one saw them in type. One way or another, I gathered
that he was at work in our common groove, and had shelved, for the
present at all events, his proposed play, about which you will remember
I had undertaken to ask no questions.

"I was quite mistaken. One night in the following March he came to me
with a haggard face, a beaming eye, and a stout, clean manuscript, which
he brought down with a thud on my desk. It was the play he had sketched
out to me eight or nine months before. I was horrified to hear he had
been at work upon it alone from that night to this. He had written, so
he said, during all this time, not another line, only each line of his
play some ten times over.

"I recollect looking curiously at his shabby clothes, and then reminding
him that it was at his place, not mine, I was to have heard him read the
play: and how he confessed that he had no chair for me there--that his
room was, in fact, three parts dismantled--that he had sacrificed
everything to the play, which was worth it. I was extremely angry. I
could have helped him so easily, independent as I was of the calling I
loved to follow. But there was about him always an accursed, unnecessary
independence, which has since struck me--and I think I may say so after
all these years--as the mark of a rather humble, very honest origin.

"He read me the play, and I cried over the third act, and so did he. I
thought then, and still think, that there was genius in that third
act--it took you off your feet. And to me, certainly, it seemed as if
the piece must act as well as it read, though indeed, as I took care to
say and to repeat, my opinion was well-nigh valueless on that point. I
only knew that