You may almost put it that for a time they do the same. At all events for the next few weeks the record keeps a very slight hold on them and their doings. Jack knew, you see, that--though not a disapproving sort, as a rule, and in those days (though you children will hardly believe it) inclined to like my friends the better for doing what they jolly well pleased--I barred this vendetta-game of his, and would have called him off if I could. Folk were a bit more squeamish, if you remember, in those dear old pre-War days. But please note _this_, for it is a part of his story. Jack wrote seldom, having a sense that I didn't want to hear. When he did write, however, he was liable at any time to break away from the light, half-jesting, half-defiant tone which he had purposely chosen to cover our disagreement, and to give me a sentence or two, or even a page, of cold-blooded confession. It may have been that his purpose, at that point, suddenly absorbed him, sucked him under. It may have been that his fixed idea had begun to spread like a disease over his other sensibilities, hardening and deadening the tissue, so that he did this kind of thing unconsciously. It may have been both. You shall judge before we have finished. I will give you just one specimen. It occurs in the very first letter addressed from America. He and Farrell had spent five days in New York: "I am going to ease the chain--to run it out several lengths, in fact. I shall still keep pretty close in attendance on the patient, but my professional visits will be rarer. A new and more strenuous course of treatment requires these holidays, if his nerves are not to break down under it. "The suggestion, after all, came from him, and I am merely improving on it. . . . This continent has started a small heat-wave--the first of the summer. Now Farrell, who perspires freely, tells me that he doesn't mind any amount of heat, so that it isn't accompanied by noise: but noise and heat combined drive him crazy. I had myself noted that while the tall buildings here excited no curiosity in him, he acted as the veriest rubberneck under the clang and roar of the overhead trains; and the din of Broadway, he confessed, gave him vertigo after the soft tide of traffic that moves broad and full-- 'strong without rage, without o'erflowing full'--down Tottenham Court Road, embanked with antique furniture or colourable imitations.