“Anthony,” said he--“I hope you will not mind my saying so, but you were always most reckless in your expenditure--or rather in your loans to all that army of hangers-on about you.” It came to Anthony, as he stood in the withering blight of this man’s lack of sympathy, that if he were going to ask for help he must set aside all delicacy and put the situation before him bluntly. He made an unwilling start: “Some years ago, Paul,” he said, “after you had made your mark in Paris, and were doing the round of the foreign courts, you no doubt heard that Caroline made rather a sensation with a book.” Pangbutt nodded: “I have read it,” he said--but his attitude was enigma. Anthony was relieved to find there was to be no oratorial protest in honour of Style. He went on as though repeating a distasteful task he had set himself: “It has been attacked from all sides. It is as dead--as--a railway sandwich.” “That is rather a misfortune,” said Pangbutt. Anthony laughed. He felt strangely ashamed--of himself--of his friend. And it flashed through his thinking parts, with lightning stroke, that this was the man whom Caroline had nursed through the typhoid. He was roused from his reflections by Pangbutt’s sharp question: “And you?” He searched about in his mind for what he had last said: “Eh? Me? Oh, ah, yes; I tried to grow a garden of literature in Fleet Street--to bring to blossom the tender buds of the new school of thought. But my star was not in journalism. My paper was burnt up in the fire of the young immortals who flocked to my office, whose masterpieces few would buy--or read.” He smiled a wan smile, and sighed: “The paper has gone into ash.... That’s why, when the wind blows keen, there is so much dust in Fleet Street.” Pangbutt’s eyes were fixed critically upon his own survey of this man’s past, and he had but half listened to the other’s words: “On the whole,” said he drily, “you have not been very fortunate, then?” Anthony laughed sadly, but said nothing. It was definitely borne in upon him that he would never be able to ask this man for money. The other was embarrassed by the silence: “What are you going to do?” he asked uncomfortably. Anthony roused himself. He took up the thread of his appeal, but he now went on vaguely--he felt that it was hopeless: