or unfriendly climate soon droop and die.  They have no spiritual resources wherewith to contemplate what they do not understand or know.  Now his friends would leave him.  Now that bright world of which he had been a part would know him no more.  It was pathetic, really.  He emanated a kind of fear.  Depression and even despair seemed to hang about him like a cloak.  He could not shake it off.  And yet, literally, in his case there was nothing to fear, if he had only known.

And yet two years before he did die, I knew he would.  Fantastic as it may seem, to be shut out from that bright world of which he deemed himself an essential figure was all but unendurable.  He had no ready money now—­not the same amount anyhow.  He could not greet his old-time friends so gayly, entertain so freely.  Meeting him on Broadway shortly after the failure and asking after his affairs, he talked of going into business for himself as a publisher, but I realized that he could not.  He had neither the ability nor the talent for that, nor the heart.  He was not a business man but a song-writer and actor, had never been anything but that.  He tried in this new situation to write songs, but he could not.  They were too morbid.  What he needed was some one to buoy him up, a manager, a strong confidant of some kind, some one who would have taken his affairs in hand and shown him what to do.  As it was he had no one.  His friends, like winter-frightened birds, had already departed.  Personally, I was in no position to do anything at the time, being more or less depressed myself and but slowly emerging from difficulties which had held me for a number of years.

About a year or so after he failed my sister E——­ announced that Paul had been there and that he was coming to live with her.  He could not pay so much then, being involved with all sorts of examinations of one kind and another, but neither did he have to.  Her memory was not short; she gave him the fullness of her home.  A few months later he was ostensibly connected with another publishing house, but by then he was feeling so poorly physically and was finding consolation probably in some drinking and the caresses of those feminine friends who have, alas, only caresses to offer.  A little later I met a doctor who said, “Paul cannot live.  He has pernicious anaemia.  He is breaking down inside and doesn’t know it.  He can’t last long.  He’s too depressed.”  I knew it was so and what the remedy was—­money and success once more, the petty pettings and flattery of that little world of which he had been a part but which now was no more for him.  Of all those who had been so lavish in their greetings and companionship earlier in his life, scarcely one, so far as I could make out, found him in that retired world to which he was forced.  One or two pegged-out actors sought him and borrowed a little of the little that he had; a few others came when he had nothing at all.  His partners, quarreling among themselves and feeling