Everybody knew it was Yeats’s birthday. But when I made an epiphany, so to speak, and told Joyce this, at the first tram stop he got out. Yeats was lodging in the Cavendish Hotel, in Rutland Square, and he solemnly walked in and knocked at Yeats’s door. When Yeats opened the door of the sitting-room he said, “What age are you, sir?” and Yeats said, “I’m forty.”—”You are too old for me to help. I bid you good-bye.
— Oliver St. John Gogarty (I believe).
