Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel....”
We laughed ‹after that futile fashion that becomes a kind of habit nowadays› and said, “We always think that sounds so uncomfortable!”
He raised those blue eyes, half humorously, half deprecatingly. “You make me feel ashamed of being incorrigibly romantic.”
It was we who felt ashamed.
“We are sure,” we answered, “you have a good friend somewhere.”
“Yes,” he said, “the best ever a man had.”
We are glad to think that friendship was with him all through and at the end. In one of the last letters ever received from the doomed Antarctic Expedition the tribute is paid again: “No words of mine,” writes he, “can describe what he is.”
TOM’S GRAND MANNERS