I had to haggle with my generous friend and to beat him down half of his original offer. My stipend settled, “I admit,” said he, “that I am ravenously hungry. Suppose we dine?” We adjourned to Moretti’s. During the dinner we discussed our future. He said he was constantly writing new matter and therefore our contract would not terminate with the completion of the particular MS. in question. “Ah, what good times we are going to enjoy!” he cried. “We are perfectly companionable! There is nothing so satisfactory, nothing so productive of bien être, as friendship, after all.” Dinner over, we strolled arm in arm through the streets. For the first time in two years I began to feel that the world was not quite a ruin. At home we talked till late into the night. And when I went to bed it was to lie awake for hours and hours, congratulating myself upon my newly discovered friend. IX. ON the morrow morning our régime was inaugurated: and thenceforward we kept it up regularly. From nine till one I wrote at his dictation. The task was by no means irksome. I enjoyed my friend’s poetry: and besides, we varied the business with frequent interruptions for conversation and cigarettes. Merivale taught me to smoke—a vice, if it be a vice, from which I have since derived no little solace. At one o’clock our luncheon was served up to us by the lady of the house: and the remainder of the day we employed as best suited our fancy. Sometimes we would take turns at reading aloud. In this way we read much of Browning and Rossetti, two poets till then total strangers to me. Sometimes we would saunter about the lower quarters of the city. Merivale never tired of the glimpses these excursions afforded into the life of the common people. He maintained that New York was the most picturesque city in the world, “thanks,” he said, “to the presence of your people, the Jews.” Sometimes we would visit the picture galleries, where my friend initiated me into the enjoyment of a new art. Musician-like, I had theretofore cared little and understood nothing about painting. Merivale was fond of quoting the German dictum, “Das Sehen mussgelernt sein!”—it was all the German he knew—and now he taught me to see. I was in precisely the mood to appreciate this altered mode of existence to the utmost. At Merivale’s touch the pain that for two years had been as a lump in my throat was dissolved and diffused, tinging my life with melancholy instead of consuming it with sullen, unremitting fever.