ascetics of passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for hatred, as other men for God, for Mary and for the Saints." My friend was not interested in passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her beauty or her circumstances, and drew him the more strongly if the curiosity she aroused was half intellectual. A little later than the time I write of, throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or hippodrome, he began "O Yeats, I was never in love with a serpent-charmer before." He was objective. For him "the visible world existed" as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a moon that had entered its fourth quarter.
XL
At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his beautiful young wife near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a students' hotel in the Latin Quarter, and I cannot remember always where I stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or Macgregor, for he shed the "Mathers" when what the newspapers called the "Celtic Movement" was well started, would come down to breakfast one day with his Horace, the next day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a rage—what right had I to take sides with the English enemy—and I found that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword-dance, and his mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited there by some White Rose society, Scotland itself. One day in every week he gave to the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit blood. That did not matter he said, because it came from his head, not his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under some great strain, and presently I noticed that he was drinking neat brandy, not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body.
He began to foresee vast changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the imminence of immense wars, and in 1895 or 1896 began to learn ambulance work, and made others learn it. He had
