there was no hope of money, and with the grim alternative of the office desk before him he couldn’t postpone his attempt at literature.  The stuff he turned out was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first.  Still, the absurdity of deciding a man’s whole future on a first trial seemed to justify me in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth to flower.

“At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point of getting his term of probation extended.  When I left Rome he went with me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice.  I said to myself:  ’If he has anything in him, it will come out now; and it did.  He was never more enchanting and enchanted.  There were moments of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually to pass into his face—­but only to issue forth in a shallow flood of the palest ink ...

“Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand but mine to do it.  We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal pension when he had to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition.  I hadn’t, of course, relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to advise him to drop literature.  I had sent his stuff to various people—­editors and critics—­and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of comment.  Really there was nothing on earth to say about it—­

“I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I decided to have it out with Gilbert.  It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters—­but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on that plea?  I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction.  Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

“The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now ...  I’d been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his future hung on my verdict—­we’d tacitly agreed to that.  The manuscript lay between us, on my table—­a novel, his first novel, if you please!—­and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at me with all his life in the look.

“I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his face and on the manuscript.

“‘The fact is, my dear Gilbert,’ I began—­

“I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

“’Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow!  I’m not so awfully cut up as all that!’ His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.