“I can’t,” I said finally, or so I thought.  “I won’t.  I don’t need your help.  You don’t owe me anything.  You’ve done enough already.”

“Owe, hell!” he retorted.  “Who’s talking about ‘owe’?  And you my brother—­my own flesh and blood!  Why, Thee, for that matter, I owe you half of ‘On the Banks,’ and you know it.  You can’t go on living like this.  You’re sick and discouraged.  You can’t fool me.  Why, Thee, you’re a big man.  You’ve just got to come out of this!  Damn it—­don’t you see—­don’t make me”—­and he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.  “You can’t help yourself now, but you can later, don’t you see?  Come on.  Get your things.  I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t.  You’ve got to come, that’s all.  I won’t go without you,” and he began looking about for my bag and trunk.

I still protested weakly, but in vain.  His affection was so overwhelming and tender that it made me weak.  I allowed him to help me get my things together.  Then he paid the bill, a small one, and on the way to the hotel insisted on forcing a roll of bills on me, all that he had with him.  I was compelled at once, that same day or the next, to indulge in a suit, hat, shoes, underwear, all that I needed.  A bedroom adjoining his suite at the hotel was taken, and for two days I lived there, later accompanying him in his car to a famous sanitarium in Westchester, one in charge of an old friend of his, a well-known ex-wrestler whose fame for this sort of work was great.  Here I was booked for six weeks, all expenses paid, until I should “be on my feet again,” as he expressed it.  Then he left, only to visit and revisit me until I returned to the city, fairly well restored in nerves if not in health.

But could one ever forget the mingled sadness and fervor of his original appeal, the actual distress written in his face, the unlimited generosity of his mood and deed as well as his unmerited self-denunciation?  One pictures such tenderness and concern as existing between parents and children, but rarely between brothers.  Here he was evincing the same thing, as soft as love itself, and he a man of years and some affairs and I an irritable, distrait and peevish soul.

Take note, ye men of satire and spleen.  All men are not selfish or hard.

The final phase of course related to his untimely end.  He was not quite fifty-five when he died, and with a slightly more rugged quality of mind he might have lasted to seventy.  It was due really to the failure of his firm (internal dissensions and rivalries, in no way due to him, however, as I have been told) and what he foolishly deemed to be the end of his financial and social glory.  His was one of those simple, confiding, non-hardy dispositions, warm and colorful but intensely sensitive, easily and even fatally chilled by the icy blasts of human difficulty, however slight.  You have no doubt seen some animals, cats, dogs, birds, of an especially affectionate nature, which when translated to a strange