It was thus, at any rate, with the pardonable exaggeration of ignorant twenty-five, I saw and knew the Old Man of Visions. It was his deep heart of poetry, rather than his fine intellect I worshipped. The under-mind in him, the subconscious region, I think, was whole and healed; it was the upper-mind, the surface consciousness, that alone was damaged. If this mind was wrecked, this brain partly in ruins, the soul in him peered forth above the broken towers, remaining splendidly aware. Not even the imperfect instrument through which it worked could prevent this fine expression: behind the disproportion of various delusions, behind the outer tumbled ruins, there dwelt unaffected in him that greater thing than any intellect--Understanding. CHAPTER XXXI It was with a singular young man, who claimed proudly to be the illegitimate son of a certain duke, that I found myself presently in the eau de Cologne business. A long difficult winter had passed; all my friends had disappeared; there had been periods of dried apples again, of posing in studios, of various odd jobs, and of half-starving, with black weeks in plenty. I had moved into yet cheaper quarters, where I occupied a room that had been formerly a butler’s pantry, and was so small that when the folding-bed was down the entire space from wall to wall was occupied. The wash-hand stand was a sink in a recess let into the wall and supplied with a tap. When Mr. Louis visited me, as he did frequently, we lowered the bed and used it as a divan. The door could not open then. I made tea in the sink. We talked.... If Louis’s atmosphere suggested choirs and places where they sing, that of Brodie, as I may call him here, was associated with bars and places where they drink. Not that he drank himself, for he was most abstemious, but that in certain superior saloons, all of them far above my means, he was usually to be found. A simple, yet complex, generous as well as mean creature, with all the canniness of the Scot, with his uncanniness as well, his education had been neglected, he read with difficulty, and only wrote well enough to sign his name laboriously to a cheque. He, too, like Louis, had his mystery; there was no one, indeed, in my circle of those days whose antecedents would bear too close a scrutiny.