There was, however, several years later, a sequel to all this and one so characteristic of him that it has always remained in my mind as one of the really beautiful things of life, and I might as well tell it here and now.  About five years later I had become so disappointed in connection with my work and the unfriendly pressure of life that I had suffered what subsequently appeared to have been a purely psychic breakdown or relapse, not physical, but one which left me in no mood or condition to go on with my work, or any work indeed in any form.  Hope had disappeared in a sad haze.  I could apparently succeed in nothing, do nothing mentally that was worth while.  At the same time I had all but retired from the world, living on less and less until finally I had descended into those depths where I was in the grip of actual want, with no place to which my pride would let me turn.  I had always been too vain and self-centered.  Apparently there was but one door, and I was very close to it.  To match my purse I had retired to a still sorrier neighborhood in B——­, one of the poorest.  I desired most of all to be let alone, to be to myself.  Still I could not be, for occasionally I met people, and certain prospects and necessities drove me to various publishing houses.  One day as I was walking in some street near Broadway (not on it) in New York, I ran into my brother quite by accident, he as prosperous and comfortable as ever.  I think I resented him more than ever.  He was of course astonished, shocked, as I could plainly see, by my appearance and desire not to be seen.  He demanded to know where I was living, wanted me to come then and there and stay with him, wanted me to tell him what the trouble was—­all of which I rather stubbornly refused to do and finally got away—­not however without giving him my address, though with the caution that I wanted nothing.

The next morning he was there bright and early in a cab.  He was the most vehement, the most tender, the most disturbed creature I have ever seen.  He was like a distrait mother with a sick child more than anything else.

“For God’s sake,” he commented when he saw me, “living in a place like this—­and at this number, too!” (130 it was, and he was superstitious as to the thirteen.) “I knew there’d be a damned thirteen in it!” he ejaculated.  “And me over in New York!  Jesus Christ!  And you sick and run down this way!  I might have known.  It’s just like you.  I haven’t heard a thing about you in I don’t know when.  Well, I’m not going back without you, that’s all.  You’ve got to come with me now, see?  Get your clothes, that’s all.  The cabby’ll take your trunk.  I know just the place for you, and you’re going there tomorrow or next day or next week, but you’re coming with me now.  My God, I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself, and me feeling the way I do about you!” His eyes all but brimmed.

I was so morose and despondent that, grateful as I felt, I could scarcely take his mood at its value.  I resented it, resented myself, my state, life.