He seemed to repress a smile that was hovering on his lips.

“The voice of the enemy,” I commented.

“Yes, sir, the voice of the enemy,” he added.  “But don’t think that I think I’m done for.  Not at all.  I have just returned to my old ways in order to think this thing out.  In a year or two I’ll have solved my problem, I hope.  I may have to leave here, and I may not.  Anyhow, I’ll turn up somewhere, with something.”

He did have to leave, however, public opinion never being allowed to revert to him again, and five years later, in a fairly comfortable managerial position in New York, he died.  He had made a fight, well enough, but the time, the place, the stars, perhaps, were not quite right.  He had no guiding genius, possibly, to pull him through.  Adherents did not flock to him and save him.  Possibly he wasn’t magnetic enough—­that pagan, non-moral, non-propagandistic quality, anyhow.  The fates did not fight for him as they do for some, those fates that ignore the billions and billions of others who fail.  Yet are not all lives more or less failures, however successful they may appear to be at one time or another, contrasted, let us say, with what they hoped for?  We compromise so much with everything—­our dreams and all.

As for his reforms, they may be coming fast enough, or they may not. In medias res.

But as for him...?

W.L.S.

Life’s little ironies are not always manifest.  We hear distant rumbling sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the reality.  Therefore the real incidents which I am about to relate may have some value.

I first called upon W.L.  S——­, Jr., in the winter of 1895.  I had known of him before only by reputation, or, what is nearer the truth, by seeing his name in one of the great Sunday papers attached to several drawings of the most lively interest.  These drawings depicted night scenes of the city of New York, and appeared as colored supplements, eleven by eighteen inches.  They represented the spectacular scenes which the citizen and the stranger most delight in—­Madison Square in a drizzle; the Bowery lighted by a thousand lamps and crowded with “L” and surface cars; Sixth Avenue looking north from Fourteenth Street.

I was a youthful editor at the time and on the lookout for interesting illustrations of this sort, and when a little later I was in need of a colored supplement for the Christmas number I decided to call upon S——.  I knew absolutely nothing about the world of art save what I had gathered from books and current literary comment of all sorts, and was, therefore, in a mood to behold something exceedingly bizarre in the atmosphere with which I should find my illustrator surrounded.