where does it lead to? Some day, perhaps, my ideas will give out and
then----' he made a little hopeless gesture.

He was silent a moment, staring out of the window. 'Then there's
another thing,' he went on, 'this constant grind leaves me no time to
get on with my play. If I could only get it finished it might bring me
success--even fame. But how shall I ever get the leisure to complete
it?'

A feeling of compunction swept over me. I went up to him and put my
hand on his shoulder. 'Henry, dear old chap, I never thought you felt
like this about things.' Certainly he was writing a play, but as he
had been engaged on it now for over ten years (Henry is a conscientious
writer), my interest in it was not so keen as it had been when he first
told me of the idea a decade previously.

'Couldn't you do a little of your play every evening after dinner?' I
suggested.

'I'm too brain weary by that time--my ideas seem to have given out.
Sometimes I think I must renounce the notion of going on with it--and
it's been one of my greatest ambitions.'

I smoothed his hair tenderly, noticing how heavily flecked it was with
grey and how it silvered at the temples. Poor Henry, he reminded me
just then of _L'homme à la cervelle d'or_, a fantastic story of
Daudet's, where he tells of a man possessed of a brain of gold which he
tore out, atom by atom, to buy gifts for the woman he loved until, in
the end (she being an extravagant type), he was left without a scrap of
brain to call his own and so expired. The man was, of course, supposed