My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat. The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.