“Yet the curious thing is he has read a lot and has a sort of vision:  that Shakespeare stuff of his is extraordinary; but he takes sincerity for style, and poetry as poetry has no appeal for him.  You heard him admit that himself last night....

“He’s comic, really:  curiously provincial like all Americans.  Fancy a Jeremiad preached by a man in a fur coat!  Frank’s comic.  But he’s really kind and fights for his friends.  He helped me in prison greatly:  sympathy is a sort of religion to him:  that’s why we can meet without murder and separate without suicide....

“Talking literature with him is very like playing Rugby football....  I never did play football, you know; but talking literature with Frank must be very like playing Rugby where you end by being kicked violently through your own goal,” and he laughed delightedly.

I had listened without thinking as I often listened to his talk for the mere music of the utterance; now, at a break in the monologue, I went into the next room, feeling that to listen consciously would be unworthy.  On the whole his view of me was not unkindly:  he disliked to hear any opinion that differed from his own and it never came into his head that Oxford was no nearer the meridian of truth than Lawrence, Kansas, and certainly at least as far from Heaven.

Some weeks later I left La Napoule and went on a visit to some friends.  He wrote complaining that without me the place was dull.  I wired him and went over to Nice to meet him and we lunched together at the Cafe de la Regence.  He was terribly downcast, and yet rebellious.  He had come over to stay at Nice, and stopped at the Hotel Terminus, a tenth-rate hotel near the station; the proprietor called on him two or three days afterwards and informed him he must leave the hotel, as his room had been let.

“Evidently someone has told him, Frank, who I am.  What am I to do?”

I soon found him a better hotel where he was well treated, but the incident coming on top of the Alexander affair seemed to have frightened him.

“There are too many English on this coast,” he said to me one day, “and they are all brutal to me.  I think I should like to go to Italy if you would not mind.”

“The world is all before you,” I replied.  “I shall only be too glad for you to get a comfortable place,” and I gave him the money he wanted.  He lingered on at Nice for nearly a week.  I saw him several times.  He lunched with me at the Reserve once at Beaulieu, and was full of delight at the beauty of the bay and the quiet of it.  In the middle of the meal some English people came in and showed their dislike of him rudely.  He at once shrank into himself, and as soon as possible made some pretext to leave.  Of course I went with him.  I was more than sorry for him, but I felt as unable to help him as I should have been unable to hold him back if he had determined to throw himself down a precipice.