You would have then found yourself in a pitiable position: your tour would have been arrested at its outset: your companion would have been ill without doubt: perhaps might have needed care and attendance, in some little remote French village.

You would have given it to me, I know.

But I felt it would have been wrong, stupid, and thoughtless of me to have started an expedition doomed to swift failure, and perhaps fraught with disaster and distress.

You are a man of dominant personality: your intellect is exigent, more so than that of any man I ever knew: your demands on life are enormous: you require response, or you annihilate: the pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas.
To survive you, one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character.

In your luncheon parties, in the old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the _debris_ of the feast.