It was past midnight, and both men were smoking leisurely by the study fireside. Morgan Druce sat just on the edge of a low chair, his long, slim body bent forward, his clean-shaven boyish face well within the glow of the fire. Though he appeared to be looking at it, he was only conscious of its warmth.

Robert Ingram, middle-aged and bearded, lolled back in sensuous comfort. “The long and the short of it is,” he resumed, “you’ve a soul-crisis on just at present. Crises are bad for the digestion, and I took care to grow out of them long ago.”

“Our temperaments are very different,” said Morgan.

“That’s what makes your case so difficult to meet,” returned Ingram. “It’s your infernal temperament. One never knows how to take it. In fact, you’re the sort of person in whose existence I never really believed; for though, as you know, I once had ideals and a literary conscience, I was always aware they would go as soon as I had a market for everything I could manufacture. You are the genuine incorruptible artist, to whom art is sacred. I really don’t know whether to be doubtful of my cynicism or your sanity.”

“That my case is a pretty bad one I’ve already admitted,” put in Morgan.

“Now, if you were only some poor devil who was alone in the world,” went on Ingram without heeding his remark, “I could take you in hand and make something of you, for you’ve quite brains enough. Poor devils are generally more reasonable in their views than you, even when they’re geniuses. You simply keep on wearing out your heart day after day. Why? For fame? What is it worth? Well, I won’t answer the question I deal quite enough in platitudes.”

“You don’t understand, Ingram. What do you really know of me?”

“Well, if I don’t know you by this time, you must be an uncommonly deep person or perhaps I am an uncommonly shallow one.”

Morgan Druce did not answer. His last remark had been more of a reflection than an interrogation. What did Ingram really know of him, he asked himself again, despite the five years of the indefinable relation between them? Admitting that the man beneath the cynic was kindly and sympathetic, yet he could not but be aware that Ingram’s treason to the aspirations of his youth had destroyed the finer edge of feeling. His vision did not respond to subtler vibrations; his judgment was broad and coarse.

Such was Morgan’s intuition about Robert Ingram. He believed the man to be sincere with him and he trusted him. And yet, as he looked up now and saw Ingram, relapsed into his luxurious arm chair, blowing rings of smoke, he seemed to detect something in his expression that filled him with a vague distrust about the genuineness of his professed interest in him. There was a sort of swagger in his whole posture, a slickness about his well-dressed, well-fed body, and a self-satisfaction in his somewhat burly face, nay, even in the manner his fat fingers held his fat cigar, that set Morgan wondering for the first time whether Ingram’s attitude to literature did not in truth sum up the whole man; whether that popular novelist and dramatist could really have a place in his heart for anything that was of unimportance to his own personal existence for a poor devil of a poetaster, for instance.

It was one of those sudden doubts that are created by a chance glimpse from an accidental new point of view; and Morgan thrust it from him as absurd and unjust. It could have no foundation, else why had Ingram responded to his appeal at the beginning? Why had he tolerated his calls all these years? Why were they talking together in that room now?

He had often been puzzled about this relation between them, though, as with his friendship with Lady Thiselton, its very strangeness and originality pleased him. His relation to that charming woman was, he felt, both indefinable and incredible; and his relation to the man beside him, though less odd, could be included neither in the category of acquaintanceship nor in that of friendship. Morgan was ignorant of Ingram’s personal life, even as Ingram was ignorant of such a large fact in his own as Lady Thiselton. Their coming together had been always on the ground of their one common interest; otherwise there was the most absolute mutual exclusiveness between their existences. True that Morgan’s periodical appearance at this Albert Gate flat, of which Ingram had made for himself a luxurious bachelor’s home, had eventually resulted in a certain frankness of speech and familiarity of manner between them. But here their intercourse began and ended.

Perhaps Morgan had all along seen the position a little bit out of perspective; the very freedom with which Ingram had come to unmask himself before him and the intimacy with which they addressed each other had perhaps misled him. The cheery breeziness of Ingram had attracted him a good deal from the first, and he had liked the man for the ready good nature he had displayed towards him. And altogether it had been easy for him to think that he had done more than just rub up against the surface of Ingram’s life, the depth and fullness of which he had scarcely realised.

At the beginning he had looked upon his being allowed to come and see the older man now and again as a privilege. It had never struck him to look at these visits of his from the other’s point of view. It was precisely this point of view that now forced itself upon him as he struggled with the suspicion that had come to him. Had Ingram looked upon him merely as somebody who deserved to be good-humouredly tolerated? And was his openness only due to the consciousness of his (Morgan’s) being an outsider, into whose ears he had got into the habit of speaking thoughts he would have told to no other living person, pretty much as he might have written them in a diary? Such a habit was easy to acquire with regard to an outsider whom one came into contact with periodically, and with whom one had a long talk each time.

He was not pleased, however, that such a train of thought should have come to him, and, urged by something akin to remorse, his mind went travelling back over the past five years in search of arguments in favour of Ingram.

There was a long interval during which both smoked in silence.

“Do you remember,” asked Morgan, at length, “the circumstances under which we first became acquainted?”

“Perfectly,” responded Ingram. “You wrote me a long letter, a rather pathetic one. That was the first intimation I had of your existence.”

“Did you destroy that letter?”

“I never destroy letters compromising ones, of course, always excepted.”

“Then I may assume it still exists. Would it give you very much trouble to find it now?”

“I pride myself upon my system,” answered Ingram.

“Please put it to the test, then.”

“Your system is excellent,” admitted Morgan, as at the end of about five minutes Ingram held up the sheets in triumph. “Now I wonder if you’d read it to me. I want to hear how it sounds.”

“Certainly, you amusing beggar,” said Ingram. “You wrote it during your last crisis and you want to compare your feelings then with now.”

“I forget what I wrote,” said Morgan, with an attempt at gaiety. “It must be very dramatic, so please put the proper expression into it, just as if it were a passage in one of your plays.”

“Dear Mr. Ingram,” read out that gentleman. “For nearly six years I have been trying to live by writing verse ever since I was seventeen. Six years of passionate hope and longing, failure and failure, all years of wandering in the desert, of groping in the dark. I know no one no one to criticise me no one to encourage, to blame, or to praise; only the voice of purpose in my breast. Amid loneliness this passion for fruitless labour has grown strong, frenzied, blind. Perhaps one day I shall penetrate if I live. But for life one must have food; for work one must have shelter. At twenty-three one does not want to die; not when one has lived always in the future, when one has striven and toiled for recognition that may yet come. Not mere recognition of genius or talent, of knack or gift, but recognition of Truth as opposed to Imposture, of my right to life, of my right to give free and full expression of the individuality that is mine.

“As matters are now I am utterly friendless so far as my inner life is concerned I can see no other end than fall. God knows what shape that fall is destined to take; into what mire my soul must plunge in the fight for life. I could bear anything if I were not so utterly alone and helpless. I would do hack-work if I but knew Grub Street. I would sell my soul to a publisher for fifty pounds a year. Anything to get my foot on the lowest rung of the ladder! Anything to help me on the way to freedom!

“If you could see me, speak to me, help me in any way! Believe me, I do not wish to force my personality on you. I do not want you to give me any material thing. I only beg of you to aid me in asserting my claim on life by telling how I may win bread.

“I should be deeply grateful for a word from you. In any case, pardon this intrusion. Yours, etc., Morgan Druce.”

Ingram drew a long breath and threw the sheets on to the table.

“Have I read it nicely?” he asked.

“And I wrote that to you, Robert Ingram!” exclaimed Morgan, brokenly.

“You did,” said Ingram, quietly. “And you know what the sequel was.”

“You were moved by my appeal. You came to seek me out.”

“Well, your letter interested me. It was not the letter of a duffer or a swindler the sort of thing you can tell by its ornate pompousness; and it just caught me when I was somewhat bored by things, so that I rather welcomed it as an excitement. I expected to find you lodging in some miserable cottage a Chatterton in a garret. I came to bring food to the hungry. Instead ”

“You found me living in a palace standing in a fine park, with no lack of loaves and fishes, of milk and honey.”

“It was the greatest surprise of my life. When I could no longer doubt that the only people called Druce in the neighbourhood lived in the magnificent Elizabethan mansion, whose name was that of the supposed cottage from which you addressed your letter, I began to think the family kept a skeleton in one of the cupboards. In plain language ”

“You thought one of the members of the family must be a lunatic.”

“Anyway, the champagne was first-class, the cigars were worth half-a-crown apiece,” said Ingram, laughing.

“And when you had gone into the matter you thought that if I wasn’t quite a lunatic, I was not far short of one for disagreeing with my father.”

“Frankly, I did.”

“You never really sympathised.”

“I did all the time I conceived of you as a Chatterton.”

“A palace is worse than a garret,” asserted Morgan, “under the conditions in which I lived.”

“Bah! You know nothing about garrets. And, as I pointed out to you, even if, in spite of the competition, you did sell your soul to a publisher for fifty pounds a year, he’d take care to stick to it. You were hopelessly wrong in your ideas about getting your foot on the first rung of the ladder.”

“I am ashamed of ever having had those ideas of ever having been willing to suppress my individuality, if only temporarily, for the sake of living. It all ought to have ended then. Why did you advise me to go on?”

“I only advised you to go on writing I took the other thing for granted. In the light of my experience of myself at the same age, I judged it was the only advice you would take. And then having entered on the adventure, I wanted to finish it; so naturally I set about making peace between father and son. Excellent man, your father! So open to reason! You must have been deuced clumsy to irritate him. To refuse to enter such a business! You’d have been a rich man in a few years. But I’m sorry to see your last remark implied a sort of reproach.”

“It was a stupid remark,” admitted Morgan. “Of course I wanted to go on. At twenty-three one does not want to die.”

“If there is still a prospect of being allowed to write poetry,” added Ingram. “You wanted to be put in the way of earning fifty pounds a year, and naturally you invoked the assistance of the man who was reputed to have a weakness for embryo genius. However, at the age of twenty-eight, it appears, one does want to die. I helped you over the last crisis; perhaps I may help you over this one. Let us look at the facts. You’ve had a good chance and you’ve been defeated. Your poetry is not wanted. As I’ve told you before, I am not competent to say whether it’s great or whether it’s downright drivel it’s years since I discovered my limitations. You’ve been imprudent enough to pay the expenses of publishing two small volumes, and certain it is that nobody found any greatness in them. I admit I couldn’t make head or tail of the bulk of the stuff I’m satisfied myself to write what plain folk can understand. To put the matter bluntly, you send work to market that most people would look on as the ravings of a lunatic. Now, my advice is cut poetry. There is plenty in the world for you to live for. Go and travel awhile. See men and cities, sculpture and paintings. Study humanity instead of merely thinking about it. Sail over the wide seas; breathe in the good air; be true to your youth and fall in love right bravely. You are rich all this is in your power. I am sure your father will be pleased.”

Morgan was touched by the other’s enthusiasm.

“I have always misunderstood you,” he cried, remorsefully; “you are not the mere gross tradesman you boast of being.”

“Really, you embarrass me. Anyway, I hope that, now your opinion of me has gone up, my advice will bear fruit. After which I shall not mind confessing that that last nice bit is a quotation from my first novel. I could have invented nothing more apropos.”

“You give me advice I am powerless to act on,” said Morgan, after some hesitation. “I spent my last shilling to-day.”

“No money!” ejaculated Ingram. “The deuce! Don’t you draw a regular income from your father?”

“That was not the arrangement,” said Morgan. “I was the first-born, and he was mortally offended by my refusal to enter the bank and carry on the name and the tradition of the house. During all those six years there had been friction and bitterness between us. At last came an appalling outbreak, and I was suffering from the full pain of my wounds when I wrote to you. You were good enough to tell him that genius sometimes earned quite considerable amounts, and the ultimate result of your intercession, of which you only knew the happy issue, not the details, was that he agreed to give me six thousand pounds, with the understanding I was never to expect another penny from him. My brother was to take my commercial birthright and I the responsibility for my whole future. I’ve earned nothing save an odd few shillings now and again, and all I had from my father I’ve somehow managed to mess away.”

“Good God!” shrieked Ingram. “Six thousand pounds in five years! An exemplary young man of simple habits like you! What could you have done with it all? You’re not a spendthrift. You don’t gamble, do you?”

“I don’t know how it has gone,” said Morgan, helplessly. “I made bad investments, I lent some of it away, and I suppose I spent the rest.”

“And you wanted to sell your soul to a publisher for fifty pounds a year! The fact is, I suppose, you don’t know the value of money at all it just melts away.”

“For me money has no value. I don’t care a pin about it,” said Morgan, doggedly.

“That’s scarcely the point,” said Ingram. “Whether you care about it or not, you’ll have to raise some of it. Let me interview your father. The fault is his. He knew you were a poet, and yet he was imprudent enough to give you capital instead of an income.”

“It was my doing. I wanted to be perfectly free and independent of him not to be worried by sordid complaints and lectures and warnings with each quarter’s cheque. I told him so frankly, and I so annoyed him even at the end that he gave me the money, saying he did not care what I did with it. I certainly intend to stand by the arrangement I made with him. That money was to be the last, and the last it shall be.”

“You are difficult,” said Ingram.

“You must be indulgent.”

Ingram lighted a new cigar and appeared lost in reflection a little while.

“There is only one thing, then, I can suggest,” he said at last.

“And that is?” asked Morgan, in a tone that clearly indicated his belief that he was beyond all suggestions.

“You can be my ghost. Don’t be alarmed you must do some work, you know, and that is the only work I can think of for you. I have to refuse very many commissions. Try your hand at some of them and I’ll run over the work and sign. As I’ve said before, you’ve got brains enough if you’ll only use them in the right direction.”

“You mean it for the best; but I could not be party to a fraud.”

“How so? My business in life is to manufacture stories and plays for the people. My signature merely guarantees the quality just as the name of a maker on a pianoforte guarantees the instrument. But every such maker employs others whose names do not appear in connection with the finished product.”

“The whole thing is impossible. Forgive me for ignoring your arguments. I ought never to have troubled you with my miserable concerns. It would, perhaps, have been better if I had never written you this.”

And Morgan took up his own letter from the table, morbidly fascinated by it, and impelled to read again the words that had been wrung from him five years before by his torturing sense of his position in life.

But, as he began to read, an odour he had been vaguely conscious of inhaling all along was wafted very perceptibly to his nostrils. Then he became aware that the letter was subtly scented.

An unreasoning anger came upon him.

“Some woman has had this in her possession,” he exclaimed.

Ingram looked at him strangely, hesitated, then seemed finally to comprehend.

“You are a veritable Lecoq,” he said coolly.

Then that conception of Ingram that had before begun to hover in Morgan’s mind now forced itself upon him wholly. He had always understood that the man had been inclined to take him somewhat as a good joke, but this he had not minded so much, so long as he believed that his personality and his aspirations really interested him. Now his sense of not having been looked upon seriously predominated, and with it came an exaggerated consciousness of everything in Ingram that was obnoxious to his spirit. If the re-reading of the letter had been a torture for him, the knowledge that it had been ruthlessly exposed to other eyes aggravated the pain tenfold, especially at this particular moment.

“And so this person, whose vile scent impregnates this, has had my soul laid bare before her for her amusement!”

“Whose vile scent?” repeated Ingram, angrily. “I must ask you not to use such language about any friend of mine.”

“You went to her, no doubt, to be praised and fawned upon for your generosity to me, and afterwards ”

“Don’t be a fool!” exclaimed Ingram, cutting him short.

“Thank you. I shall take the advice. I have been a fool long enough.”

Morgan moved out of the room, leaving Ingram flushed and motionless.