I knew Filippo Upcher years ago; knew him rather well in a world where the word “friend” is seldom correctly used. We were “pals,” rather, I should think: ate and drank together at Upcher’s extraordinary hours, and didn’t often see each other’s wives. It was Upcher’s big period. London and New York went, docile enough, to see him act Othello. He used to make every one weep over Desdemona, I know, and that is more than Shakespeare unassisted has always managed. Perhaps if he hadn’t done Othello so damnably well, with such a show of barbaric passion--It was my “little” period, if I may say it; when I was having the inevitable try at writing plays. I soon found that I could not write them, but meanwhile I lived for a little in the odd flare of the theatric world. Filippo Upcher--he always stuck, even in playbills, you remember, to the absurd name--I had met in my Harvard days, and I found him again at the very heart of that flare. The fact that his mother was an Italian whose maiden name had been brushed across with a title got him into certain drawing-rooms that his waistcoats would have kept him out of. She helped him out, for example, in Boston--where “baton sinister” is considered, I feel sure, merely an ancient heraldic term. Rachel Upcher, his wife, I used to see occasionally. She had left the stage before she married Upcher, and I fancy her tense renditions of Ibsen were the last thing that ever attracted him. My first recollection of her is in a _pose plastique_ of passionate regret that she had never, in her brief career, had an opportunity to do _Ghosts_. _Rosmersholm_, I believe, was as far as she ever went. She had beauty of the incongruous kind that makes you wonder when, where, and how the woman stole the mask. She is absolutely the only person I ever met who gave you the original of the much-imitated “mysterious” type. She was eternally mysterious--and, every day, quite impossible. It wasn’t to be expected that poor Evie should care to see much of her, and I never put the question that Mrs. Upcher seemed to be always wanting to refuse to answer. The fact is that the only time I ever took poor Evie there, Filippo and his wife quarrelled so vulgarly and violently that we came away immediately after dinner. It would have been indecent to stay. You were sure that he would beat her as soon as you left, but also that before he had hurt her much, she would have cut his head open with a plate. Very much, you see, in the style of the newspapers. I saw Filippo at the club we both had the habit of, and, on his Anglo-Saxon days, liked him fairly well. When his Italian blood rose beneath his clear skin, I would have piled up any number of fictitious engagements to avoid him. He was unspeakable then: unappeasable, vitriolic, scarce human. You felt, on such days, that he wanted his _entrée_ smeared with blood, and you lunched at another table so that at least the blood shouldn’t be yours. I used to fancy