ends to bring new
standards into it; he does: he brings America to judge Oxford and
London, much like bringing Macedon or Boeotia to judge Athens--quite
ridiculous! What can Americans know about English literature?...

"Yet the curious thing is he has read a lot and has a sort of vision:
that Shakespeare stuff of his is extraordinary; but he takes sincerity
for style, and poetry as poetry has no appeal for him. You heard him
admit that himself last night....

"He's comic, really: curiously provincial like all Americans. Fancy a
Jeremiad preached by a man in a fur coat! Frank's comic. But he's really
kind and fights for his friends. He helped me in prison greatly:
sympathy is a sort of religion to him: that's why we can meet without
murder and separate without suicide....

"Talking literature with him is very like playing Rugby football.... I
never did play football, you know; but talking literature with Frank
must be very like playing Rugby where you end by being kicked violently
through your own goal," and he laughed delightedly.

I had listened without thinking as I often listened to his talk for the
mere music of the utterance; now, at a break in the monologue, I went
into the next room, feeling that to listen consciously would be
unworthy. On the whole his view of me was not unkindly: he disliked to
hear any opinion that differed from his own and it never came into his
head that Oxford was no nearer the meridian of truth than Lawrence,
Kansas, and certainly at least as far from Heaven.

Some weeks later I left La Napoule and went on a visit to some friends.
He wrote complaining that without me the place was dull. I wired him and
went over to Nice to meet him and we lunched together at the Cafe de la
Regence. He was terribly downcast, and yet rebellious. He had come over
to stay at Nice, and stopped at the Hotel Terminus, a tenth-rate hotel
near the station; the proprietor called on him two or three days
afterwards and informed him he must leave the hotel, as his room had
been let.

"Evidently someone has told him, Frank, who I am. What am I to do?"

I soon found him a better hotel where he was well treated, but the
incident coming on top of the Alexander affair seemed to have frightened
him.

"There are too many English on this coast," he said to me one day, "and
they are all brutal to me. I think I should like to go to Italy if you
would not mind."

"The world is all before you," I replied. "I shall only