at eight-thirty at the’Cock House Tavern’on Brattle Street. In case of your acceptance will you kindly call at my rooms in Holyoke House, opposite the Widener Library, at seven-fifteen?
"Sincerely yours,
“FRANCIS STARWICK.”
He read that curt and cryptic note over and over with feelings mixed of astonishment and excitement. Who was Francis Starwick? Why should Francis Starwick, a stranger of whom he had never heard, invite him to dinner? And why was that laconic note not accompanied by a word of explanation?
It is likely he would have gone anyway, from sheer curiosity, and because of the desperate eagerness with which a young man, alone in a strange world for the first time, welcomes any hope of friendship. But before the day was over, he had learned from another student in Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, of which he himself was now a member, that Francis Starwick was Professor Hatcher’s assistant; and correctly inferring that the invitation had some connection with this circumstance, he resolved to go.
In this way, his acquaintance began with that rare and tragically gifted creature who was one of the most extraordinary figures of his generation and who, possessing almost every talent that an artist needs, was lacking in that one small grain of common earth that could have saved him, and brought his work to life.
No fatality rested on that casual meeting. He could not have foreseen in what strange and sorrowful ways his life would weave and interweave with this other one, nor could he have known from any circumstance of that first meeting that this other youth was destined to be that triune figure in his life, of which each man knows one and only one, in youth, and which belongs to the weather of man’s life, and to the fabric of his destiny: his friend, his brother—and his mortal enemy. Nor was there, in the boy he met that night, any prefigurement of the tragic fatality with which that brilliant life was starred, the horrible end toward which, perhaps, it even then was directed.
They were both young men, and both filled with all the vanity, anguish and hot pride of youth, and with its devotion and humility; they were both strong in their proud hope and faith and untried confidence; they both had shining gifts and powers and they were sure the world was theirs; they were splendid and fierce and weak and strong and foolish; the prescience of wild swelling joy was in
