consented to modify and emasculate his work; and there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone conversation in which he told a publisher who had suggested that he should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him.  And on the other hand, he once walked from Aldgate to Putney Hill, with a loose heel on one of his boots, to see a man of whom he had seen but a single drawing.  See him he did, too, in spite of the man’s footman, his liveried parlourmaid, and the daunting effect of the electric brougham at the door.

“He’s a good man,” he said to me afterwards, ruefully looking at the place where his boot-heel had been.  “You’ve got to take your good where you find it.  I don’t care whether he’s a rich amateur or skin-and-grief in a garret as long as he’s got the stuff in him.  Nobody else could have fetched me up from the East End this afternoon....  So long; see you in a week or so—­”

This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he celebrated each year the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles.  I doubt whether this observance of the ritual of his Faith was of more essential importance to him than that other philosophical religion towards which he sometimes leaned.  I have said what his real religion was.

But to the “Life.”

With these things, and others, as a beginning, I began to add page to page, phase to phase; and, in a time the shortness of which astonished myself, I had pretty well covered the whole of the first ten years of our friendship.  Maschka called rather less, and Schofield rather more frequently, than I could have wished; and my surmise that he, at least, was in love with her, quickly became a certainty.  This was to be seen when they called together.

It was when they came together that something else also became apparent.  This was their slightly derisive attitude towards the means by which I had attained my success.  It was not the less noticeable that it took the form of compliments on the outward and visible results.  Singly I could manage them; together they were inclined to get a little out of hand.

I would have taxed them fairly and squarely with this, singly or together, but for one thing—­the beautiful ease with which the “Life” was proceeding.  Never had I felt so completely en rapport with my subject.  So beautifully was the thing running that I had had the idle fancy of some actual urge from Andriaovsky himself; and each night, before sitting down to work, I set his portrait at my desk’s end, as if it had been some kind of an observance.  The most beautiful result of all was, that I felt what I had not felt for five years—­that I too was not “doing” my work, but actually living and being it.  At times I took up the sheets I had written as ignorant of their contents as if they had proceeded from another pen—­so freshly they came to me.  And once, I vow, I found, in my own handwriting, a Polish name, that I might (it is true) have subconsciously heard at some time or other, but that stirred no chord in my memory even when I saw it written.  Maschka checked and confirmed it afterwards; and I did not tell her by what odd circumstance it had issued from my pen.