To him that hath, to him shall be given.’ These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: ‘To him that hath told much, to him shall much be told.’ Nothing is further from the truth than the only too common notion that the author’s fantasy is incessantly at work within him, that his invention has an inexhaustible and continuous fund of stories and incidents upon which to draw. In reality he need only, instead of setting out to find, let himself be found by, characters and happenings, which, in so far as he has preserved the heightened capacity for observing and listening, unceasingly seek him out as their instrument of communication. To the person who has over and over again tried to trace human destinies, many tell their own story.

The following story was related to me almost entirely in the form in which I here present it — and, moreover, in most unusual circumstances. One evening when I was last in Vienna, tired after a very full day, I sought out a restaurant on the outskirts of the city which I imagined had long since ceased to be fashionable and was but little frequented. No sooner had I entered it, however, than I was made disagreeably aware of my mistake. As I passed the first table, an acquaintance jumped up with every sign of genuine pleasure — I, to be sure, did not respond with equal warmth — and invited me to join him. It would be untrue to say that this importunate gentleman was in himself an impossible or unpleasant fellow; he was merely one of those embarrassingly convivial souls who collect acquaintances as assiduously as children collect postage-stamps and are therefore peculiarly proud of every fresh addition to their collection. To this good-natured eccentric — in his spare time an erudite and competent archivist — the whole meaning of existence lay in the modest satisfaction derived from being able to remark with airy nonchalance at the mention of any name that received mention from time to time in the Press: ‘A close friend of mine,’ or ‘Ah, I met him only yesterday!’ or ‘My friend A. tells me, and my friend B. thinks,’ and so on throughout the entire alphabet. His friends could always count on him to applaud loudly at their first nights, he would ring up every actress the morning after the show to offer his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he forbore to mention disagreeable Press notices and invariably drew attention to the favourable ones out of genuine friendliness. Not at all a bad fellow, then, for he was genuinely anxious to please and was delighted if one so much as asked a small favour of him, or better still, added a fresh specimen to his cabinet of curiosities.