He seemed to me to have schooled himself into a kind of tender patience; and this attitude, I am ashamed to say, used to irritate me considerably, because it seemed to me to be so much power wasted on accepting defeat, which might have ensured victory.

He was with me a few weeks ago.  I was up in town, and he dined with me by appointment.  He told me, with a gentle philosophy, a story which made my blood boil.  He had been asked to write a book by a publisher, and the lines had been laid down for him.  “It was such a comfort to me,” he said, “because it supplied just the stimulus I could not myself originate.  My book was really rather a good piece of work; but a week ago I sent it to the publisher, and he returned it, saying it was not the least what he wanted—­he suggested my retaining about a third of it, and rewriting the rest.  Of course I could do nothing of the kind.”  “What have you done with it?” I asked.  “Oh, I have destroyed it.”  “But didn’t you see him,” I said, “or do something—­or at all events insist on payment?” “Oh no,” he said, “I could not do that—­the man was probably right—­he wanted a particular kind of book, and mine was not what he wanted.  I did say that I wished he had explained to me more clearly what he wanted—­ but after all it doesn’t very much matter.  I can get along all right, if I am careful.”

“Well,” I said, “you are really a very aggravating person.  If I could not have got my book published elsewhere, I would certainly have had a row—­I would have taken out my money’s worth in vituperation.”

Willett smiled; “I dare say you would have had some fun,” he said, “but that is not my line.  I have told you before that I can’t interest people—­I don’t think it is wholly my fault.”

We sate late, talking; and for the only time in his life he spoke to me, with a depth of emotion of which I should hardly have suspected him, of the value he set upon my friendship, and his gratitude for my sympathy.

And now this morning I have heard of his sudden death.  He was found dead in his room, bent over his papers.  He must have been writing late at night, as his custom was; and it proved on examination that he must have long suffered from an unsuspected disease of the heart.  Perhaps that may explain his failure, if it can be called a failure.  There is something to me almost insupportably pathetic to think of his lonely and uncomforted life, his isolation, his sensitiveness.  And yet I do not feel sure that it is pathetic, because his life somehow seems to me to have been one of the most beautiful I have ever known.  He did nothing much for others, he achieved nothing for himself; but it is only our miserable habit of weighing every one’s life, in a hard way, by a standard of performance and success, which makes one sigh over Francis Willett’s life.  It is very difficult at times to see what it is that life is exactly meant to do for us.  Most of the men and women I know—­I