“The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I believe, to write another great book--a definitive work on Etruscan influences in Italian art. At any rate, I’d found some pretext of the kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and dabbling about indefinitely in the Forum; and there, one morning, a charming youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar--one to Antinous, say--but he’d come instead from New York, with a letter (of all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter--the first I’d had from her since our break--was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that he ‘had talent,’ and ‘wanted to write’; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval ‘ordeal.’ Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of my chance. “Well, I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods. At any rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius. But he _was_ beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he began to talk literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well--the things he had ‘in him,’ and the things outside him that impinged! There’s the real test, after all. It was always--punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law--it was _always_ the wrong thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain grim fascination in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I acquired an astonishing skill at the game ... “The worst of it was that his _betise_ wasn’t of the too obvious sort. Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent, something that he could make ‘do’ and be happy on; and wasn’t that, after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming--he continued to be so charming--that he called forth all my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was a chance for him ...