and ‘wanted to write’; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen.  The quaint conditions of the test struck me first:  it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval ‘ordeal.’  Then I was touched by her having sent him to me.  I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of my chance.

“Well, I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods.  At any rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius.  But he was beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade too.  It was only when he began to talk literature that my heart failed me.  I knew all the symptoms so well—­the things he had ‘in him,’ and the things outside him that impinged!  There’s the real test, after all.  It was always—­punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law—­it was always the wrong thing that struck him.  I grew to find a certain grim fascination in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I acquired an astonishing skill at the game ...

“The worst of it was that his betise wasn’t of the too obvious sort.  Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at dinners he passed for clever.  I, who had him under the microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent, something that he could make ‘do’ and be happy on; and wasn’t that, after all, what I was concerned with?  He was so charming—­he continued to be so charming—­that he called forth all my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was a chance for him ...

“Those months were delightful.  Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him.  His stupidity was a natural grace—­it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes.  And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal.  At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain.  Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry—­an instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk.  Not that Gilbert didn’t—­dear lad!—­believe in himself.  There wasn’t a trace of hypocrisy in his composition.  He was sure that his ‘call’ was irresistible, while to me it was the saving grace of his situation that it wasn’t, and that a little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned him into an inoffensive idler.  Unluckily, however,