By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and over-bookish. I was perhaps his closest friend—finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single —more through shyness, inertia and parental protectiveness than through inclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent When the war came hath health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.