“I don’t know what to make of him,” he used to say. “Sometimes I think we may almost excuse him on the ground that if he had not written the _New Machiavelli_, _Perkins and Mankind_ would not exist. But, really, as I read his recent stuff, _Marriage_, _The Soul of a Bishop_, _Joan and Peter_, why, Max has ceased to be the parodist of Wells, Wells has become the parodist of Max.” As an actual “Wordsmith” Stone enjoyed a reputation something similar to that of Theodore Watts. One felt that he had only to publish what he had written, and he would receive world-wide recognition. In the notebook that never left him, he was supposed to carry the key that should unlock his heart. There lay two completed poems, and a tenth of a novel. But they were quite illegible. None of us ever saw them. Occasionally when the influence of Rhine wine had somewhat weakened the phenomenal barrier that separated Stone’s mentality from the real world of his metaphysics, he would promise to inscribe them for us in the morning in the full indelibility of purple pencil. Once he even went so far as to recite one of them; but the words came to us droningly sweet through a mist of inaudibility, and there remains only the recollection of certain sounding words, a low murmur as of a distant waterfall. In the morning all the promises were forgotten, and sometimes I have been tempted to wonder whether those poems had any real existence in the sphere of phenomena. Stone was so at the mercy of his metaphysics, he indulged in expeditions into a world whither I had neither the wish nor the ability to follow him, and perhaps he merely imagined those two poems as some manifestation of that inexplicable “Thing-in-itself” over which he was so concerned. Perhaps they had no counterpart in that draggled notebook; and though it is quite possible that some day we shall see those poems immortally enshrined in vellum, personally I rather doubt it. Those hours in the Alcove contain all I personally would wish to remember of my captivity. It was a delightful room, with its white tables and windows opening on the fowl-run; it was a perfect place in which to write. The click of billiard balls, and the murmurous rise and fall of inaudible conversations provided the ideal setting for thought. Personally I can never write in a room that is quite silent; its isolation frightens me, and through an open window I listen in vain for the indistinct noises of humanity.