“Robert confessed to Fergusson that he had been a “damn fool” and that he probably deserved what had happened to him. Not that he had been guilty of anything, but he had made real mistakes, “like claiming to know things that he didn’t know.” Fergusson thought his friend knew by now that “some of his most depressing mistakes were due to his vanity.” “He was like a wounded animal,” Fergusson recalled. “He retreated. And returned to a simpler way of life.”
