l for three months, during
which I never left him and at the end of which we had to face the
absolute prohibition of a return to England. The consideration of
climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to meet it alone. I took
him to Meran and there spent the summer with him, trying to show him by
example how to get back to work and nursing a rage of another sort that
I tried not to show him.

The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so
strangely combined that, taken together (which was how I had to take
them) they form as good an illustration as I can recall of the manner in
which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes deals with a
man's avidity. These incidents certainly had larger bearings than the
comparatively meagre consequence we are here concerned with--though I
feel that consequence also to be a thing to speak of with some respect.
It's mainly in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that at this hour
the ugly fruit of my exile is present to me. Even at first indeed the
spirit in which my avidity, as I have called it, made me regard this
term owed no element of ease to the fact that before coming back from
Rapallo George Corvick addressed me in a way I didn't like. His letter
had none of the sedative action that I must to-day profess myself
sure he had wished to give it, and the march of occurrences was not so
ordered as to make up for what it lacked. He had begun on the spot, for
one of the quarterlies, a great last word on Vereker's writings, and
this exhaustive study, the only one that would have counted, have
existed, was to turn on the new light, to utter--oh, so quietly!--the
unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace the figure in the
carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it in every tint. The
result, said Corvick, was to be the greatest literary portrait ever
painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so good as not to
trouble him with questions till he should hang up his masterpiece before
me. He did me the honour to declare that, putting aside the great
sitter himself, all aloft in his indifference, I was individually the
connoisseur he was most working for. I was therefore to be a good boy
and not try to peep under the curtain before the show-was ready: I
should enjoy it all the more if I sat very still.

I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn't help giving a jump
on seeing in _The Times_ after I had been a week or two in Munich and
be