If Murry had more than two decades to come to terms with Lawrence's ‘excessive sensibility’ and to realise his ‘genius’ without ‘ignoring the contradictions’ (Murry 1957: 121), Lawrence would never be able to do the same for Murry. He died too soon, and his circulation of Murry during his last years was almost totally negative. The spate of fiction following Murry's romantic entanglement with Frieda in the autumn of 1923 contains representations of Murry that reveal Lawrence's animosity so blatantly that it must have been obvious to all their mutual acquaintances. Earlier, when Lawrence might have suggested aspects of his relationship with Murry in Women and Love, the physical and social attributes of Gerald Crich were so different from Murry's that their friends – and even Murry himself – did not recognise the connection when the book was first published. In contrast, the three stories Lawrence wrote in the winter and spring of 1924, ‘The Last Laugh’, ‘The Border Line’ and ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, are satiric portraits of Murry that seem calculated to evoke public ridicule of the man he had once asked to be his blood-brother. A fourth story, ‘Smile’, which was written a year and a half later, reveals how the passage of time did not dampen Lawrence's urge to ridicule Murry, even if it may have muted the element of sexual rivalry (no Lawrentian figure appears in that story).