He was growing up. Shy he would always be, but in place of his boyish self-distrust had come a quiet confidence in his own powers. His mind was on the watch for its food, like an eagle ready to pounce. There was an eager, vigilant look in his eyes when one spoke of certain books unknown to him: he was questioning whether they would be what he wanted. He would pump me about the content of certain authors. I could see him accepting and rejecting. He read the poets as one quarrying marble for architectural designs of his own. His hungry reading was as different from that of the perfunctory college student as the oarsmanship of a dory fisherman on the Grand Banks is from that of an eight-oared crew on the placid Charles: the producer as contrasted with the consumer. George Meredith and Walt Whitman became two of his great companions. Once he told me that he was reading everything of Thomas Hardy he could lay his hands on. "Why?" I asked. "He knows how to set the human figure against vast backgrounds of Nature: figures outlined half against a heath and half against sky." I wonder if Romain Rolland realizes the intimacy of the friendship which has sprung up between _Jean-Christophe_ and the youth of to-day. Fritz and Christophe took an amazing shine to each other from the start. It was _Christophe_ who led Fritz to read everything else of Romain Rolland he could find, and thus his steps were guided to the summit of that Mount of Vision, Rolland's _Life of Tolstoy_, whence he looked far and wide into the stern grandeur of that moral wilderness unsubdued by man through which the heroic thinker and prophet pushes on alone.... To look is to follow. He began to devour Tolstoy's works. _The Kreutzer Sonata_ he sat up half the night beside my fire to finish. Waking towards morning I saw him scowling over it. He asked to take the book away with him. Soon he was up to his neck in the dramatists: Ibsen, Strindberg, Brieux, Sudermann, Galsworthy, Synge, Shaw. There was a performance of _Candida_ with Mr. Milton Rosmer as the poet. They say that a secret can be told only to him who knows it already. There is a secret in two tremendous speeches at the close of that play which (as the dramatist himself says) few but poets know: MORELL: (_alarmed_) Candida: don't let him do anything rash. CANDIDA: (_confident, smiling at Eugene_) Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness. MARCHBANKS: I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James, I give you my happiness with both hands. Those lines stung Fritz as the whip stings a mettled horse. His flesh rebelled, but the poet in him leaped to the truth. On March 20, 1913, the colony at 94 Charles Street adjourned to a performance of _Man and Superman_. Fritz kept his room-mate up until two in the morning discussing it. The next night he routed me out of bed at ten and quizzed me about it until three in the morning.