“_Ach! wie prachtvoll!_” he would cry a moment later, “_wie wunderschoen!_” and then would recite a translation he had made into his own tongue, and a very fine one too. Quite delighted, he would repeat the passage over and over again, pausing to compare the two versions, fixing me with his big eyes in order to increase his own pleasure in the music by witnessing the evidence of my own. Truly he was a Jekyll and Hyde. It was only during the Jekyll mood this kind of scene took place; in the Jekyll happy humour, too, that I had told him about my strange up-bringing. “Now I understand better,” he said, “why you are still so young and know so little of life, and why you are so foolishly good to Boyde”--which annoyed me, because I considered myself now quite old and a thorough man of the world as well. It was in this mood, too, that we discussed my own theories and beliefs ... a life in the woods as well. Kay, himself and his family, Boyde and I were to settle in the backwoods ... perhaps I was as eloquent as I was earnest; he listened attentively; sometimes he seemed almost ready to consent; he understood, at any rate, the deep spell that Nature had for me. But he only smiled when I said I was a failure and an outcast. My life had hardly begun yet! No man was a failure who had an object and worked for it, even though he never got within miles of accomplishment. “A life for a man is a life _among_ men,” he would say with emphasis. “The woods are all right as an interlude, but not as a career.” He was very sympathetic, but he shook his head violently. “In action lies a man’s safety in life,” he growled at me. “The world needs men of action, not dreamers,” he repeated and repeated, “and Buddhism has never yet produced a man of action. Do _something_, even if it prove the wrong thing. Dreaming, without action, is the quickest way of self-corruption I know.” And he would then urge me again to become a doctor, after which he would proceed to dream himself for an hour or two ... showing that all his life he had been far more of a dreamer than a man of action.... It was chance that suddenly led me into the doctor’s secret. He became for me, from that moment, the most pathetic and tragic of human beings. My own troubles seemed insignificant. One afternoon early in December, gloomy, very cold, a studio appointment failed, and I decided to go to the wooden house. It was that or the public library, but I wanted a talk, I wanted also to get really warm. I had no overcoat; the doctor’s room was always like an oven. The vermin I had grown accustomed to and hardly noticed them. An idea of food, too, was in my mind, for the free lunch glass of beer and salt chip-potatoes was all I had eaten since breakfast. Seven o’clock, however, was my usual hour of visit, I had never been in the afternoon before. A memorable visit; we were alone; he told me his secret very quietly.