MEETING JOSEPH PULITZER
Before I had time to examine my surroundings Mr. Pulitzer entered the
room on the arm of the major-domo. My first swift impression was of a
very tall man with broad shoulders, the rest of the body tapering away
to thinness, with a noble head, bushy reddish beard streaked with gray,
black hair, swept back from the forehead and lightly touched here and
there with silvery white. One eye was dull and half closed, the other
was of a deep, brilliant blue which, so far from suggesting blindness,
created the instant effect of a searching, eagle-like glance. The
outstretched hand was large, strong, nervous, full of character, ending
in well-shaped and immaculately kept nails.
A high-pitched voice, clear, penetrating, and vibrant, gave out the
strange challenge: "Well, here you see before you the miserable wreck
who is to be your host; you must make the best you can of him. Give me
your arm into dinner."
I may complete here a description of Mr. Pulitzer's appearance, founded
upon months of close personal association with him. The head was
splendidly modeled, the forehead high, the brows prominent and arched;
the ears were large, the nose was long and hooked; the mouth, almost
concealed by the mustache, was firm and thin-lipped; the jaws showed
square and powerful under the beard; the length of the face was much
emphasized by the flowing beard and by the way in which the hair was
brushed back from the forehead. The skin was of a clear, healthy pink,
like a young girl's; but in moments of intense excitement the color
would deepen to a dark, ruddy flush, and after a succession of sleepless
nights, or under the strain of continued worry, it would turn a dull,
lifeless gray.
I have never seen a face which varied so much in expression. Not only
was there a marked difference at all times between one side and the
other, due partly to the contrast between the two eyes and partly to a
loss of flexibility in the muscles of the right side, but almost from
moment to moment the general appearance of the face moved between a
lively, genial animation, a cruel and wolf-like scowl, and a heavy and
hopeless dejection. No face was capable of showing greater tenderness;
none could assume a more forbidding expression of anger and contempt.
The Sargent portrait, a masterpiece of vivid character-painting, is a
remarkable revelation of the complex nature of its subject. It discloses
the deep affection, the keen intelligence, the wide sympathy, the
tireless energy, the delicate sensitiveness, the tearing impatience, the
cold tyranny, and the flaming scorn by which his character was so
erratically dominated. It is a noble and pathetic monument to the
suffering which had been imposed for a quarter of a century upon the
intense and arbitrary spirit of this extraordinary man.
The account which I am to give of Mr. Pulitzer's daily life during the
months immediately preceding his death would be unintelligible to all
but the very few who knew him in recent years if it were not prefaced by
a brief biographical note.
Joseph Pulitzer was born in the village of Mako, near Buda Pesth in
Hungary, on April 10, 1847. His father was a Jew, his mother a
Christian. At the age of sixteen he emigrated to the United States. He
landed without friends, without money, unable to speak a word of
English. He enlisted immediately in the First New York (Lincoln) Cavalry
Regiment, a regiment chiefly composed of Germans and in which German was
the prevailing tongue.
Within a year the Civil War ended, and Pulitzer found himself, in common
with hundreds of thousands of others, out of employment at a time when
employment was most difficult to secure. At this time he was so poor
that he was turned away from French's Hotel for lack of fifty cents with
which to pay for his bed. In less than twenty years he bought French's
Hotel, pulled it down, and erected in its place the Pulitzer Building,
at that time one of the largest business buildings in New York, where he
housed The World.
What lay between these two events may be summed up in a few words. At
the close of the Civil War Mr. Pulitzer went to St. Louis, and in 1868,
after being engaged in various occupations, he became a reporter on the
Westliche Post. In less than ten years he was editor and part
proprietor. His amazing energy, his passionate interest in politics, his
rare gift of terse and forcible expression, and his striking personality
carried him over or through all obstacles.
After he had purchased the St. Louis Dispatch, amalgamated it with the
Post, and made the Post-Dispatch a profitable business enterprise and a
power to be reckoned with in politics, he felt the need of a wider field
in which to maneuver the forces of his character and his intellect.
He came to New York in 1883 and purchased The World from Jay Gould. At
that time The World had a circulation of less than twelve thousand
copies a day, and was practically bankrupt. From this time forward Mr.
Pulitzer concentrated his every faculty on building up The World. He was
scoffed at, ridiculed, and abused by the most powerful editors of the
old school. They were to learn, not without bitterness and wounds, that
opposition was the one fuel of all others which best fed the triple
flame of his courage, his tenacity, and his resourcefulness.
Four years of unremitting toil produced two results. The World reached a
circulation of two hundred thousand copies a day and took its place in
the front rank of the American press as a journal of force and ability,
and Joseph Pulitzer left New York, a complete nervous wreck, to face in
solitude the knowledge that he would never read print again and that
within a few years he would be totally blind.
Joseph Pulitzer, as I knew him twenty-four years after he had been
driven from active life by the sudden and final collapse of his health,
was a man who could be judged by no common standards, for his feelings,
his temper, and his point of view had been warped by years of suffering.
Had his spirit been broken by his trials, had his intellectual power
weakened under the load of his affliction, had his burning interest in
affairs cooled to a point where he could have been content to turn his
back upon life's conflict, he might have found some happiness, or at
least some measure of repose akin to that with which age consoles us for
the loss of youth. But his greatest misfortune was that all the active
forces of his personality survived to the last in their full vigor,
inflicting upon him the curse of an impatience which nothing could
appease, of a discontent which knew no amelioration.
My first meeting with Mr. Pulitzer is indelibly fixed in my memory. As
we entered the dining-room the butler motioned to me to take a seat on
Mr. Pulitzer's right hand, and as I did so I glanced up and down the
table to find myself in the presence of half-a-dozen gentlemen in
evening dress, who bowed in a very friendly manner as Mr. Pulitzer said,
with a broad sweep of his hand, "Gentlemen, this is Mr. Alleyne Ireland;
you will be able to inform him later of my fads and crotchets; well,
don't be ungenerous with me, don't paint the devil as black as he is."
This was spoken in a tone of banter, and was cut short by a curious,
prolonged chuckle, which differed from laughter in the feeling it
produced in the hearer that the mirth did not spring from the open,
obvious humor of the situation, but from some whimsical thought which
was the more relished because its nature was concealed from us. I felt
that, instead of my host's amusement having been produced by his
peculiar introduction, he had made his eccentric address merely as an
excuse to chuckle over some notion which had formed itself in his mind
from material entirely foreign to his immediate surroundings.
I mention this because I found later that one of Mr. Pulitzer's most
embarrassing peculiarities was the sudden revelation from time to time
of a mental state entirely at odds with the occupation of the moment. In
the middle of an account of a play, when I was doing my best to
reproduce some scene from memory, with appropriate changes of voice to
represent the different characters, Mr. Pulitzer would suddenly break
in, "Did we ever get a reply to that letter about Laurier's speech on
reciprocity? No? Well, all right, go on, go on."
Or it might be when I was reading from the daily papers an account of a
murder or a railroad wreck that Mr. Pulitzer would break out into a peal
of his peculiar chuckling laughter. I would immediately stop reading,
when he would pat me on the arm, and say, "Go on, boy, go on, don't mind
me. I wasn't laughing at you. I was thinking of something else. What was
it? Oh, a railroad wreck, well, don't stop, go on reading."
As soon as we were seated Mr. Pulitzer turned to me and began to
question me about my reading. Had I read any recent fiction? No? Well,
what had I read within the past month?
I named several books which I had been re-reading--Macaulay's Essays,
Meredith Townsend's Asia and Europe, and Lowes Dickinson's Modern
Symposium.
"Well, tell me something about Asia and Europe" he said.
I left my dinner untasted, and for a quarter of an hour held forth on
the life of Mohammed, on the courage of the Arabians, on the charm of
Asia for Asiatics, and on other matters taken from Mr. Townsend's
fascinating book. Suddenly Mr. Pulitzer interrupted me.
"My God! You don't mean to tell me that anyone is interested in that
sort of rubbish. Everybody knows about Mohammed, and about the bravery
of the Arabs, and, for God's sake, why shouldn't Asia be attractive to
the Asiatics! Try something else. Do you remember any plays?"
Yes, I remembered several pretty well. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra for
instance.
"Go on, then, try and tell me about that."
My prospects of getting any dinner faded away as I began my new effort.
Fortunately I knew the play very well, and remembered a number of
passages almost word for word. I soon saw that Mr. Pulitzer was
interested and pleased, not with the play as anything new to him, for he
probably knew it better than I did, but with my presentation of it,
because it showed some ability to compress narrative without destroying
its character and also gave some proof of a good memory.
When I reached the scene in which Caesar replies to Britannus's protest
against the recognition of Cleopatra's marriage to her brother, Ptolemy,
by saying, "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that
the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," Mr. Pulitzer burst
into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
I was about to continue, and try to make good better, when Mr. Pulitzer
raised his hands above his head in remonstrance.
"Stop! Stop! For God's sake! You're hurting me," very much as a person
with a cracked lip begs for mercy when you are in the middle of your
most humorous story.
I found out later that, in order to keep in Mr. Pulitzer's good graces,
it was as necessary to avoid being too funny as it was to avoid being
too dull, for, while the latter fault hurt his intellectual
sensitiveness, the former involved, through the excessive laughter it
produced, a degree of involuntary exertion which, in his disordered
physical condition, caused him acute pain.
Mr. Pulitzer's constant use of the exclamations "My God!" and "For God's
sake!" had no relation whatever to swearing, as the term is usually
understood; they were employed exactly as a French lady employs the
exclamation Mon Dieu! or a German the expression Ach, du liebe Gott! As
a matter of fact, although Mr. Pulitzer was a man of strong and, at
times, violent emotions, and, from his deplorable nervous state,
excessively irritable, I do not think that in the eight months I was
with him, during the greater part of which time he was not under any
restraining influence, such as might be exerted by the presence of
ladies, I heard him use any oath except occasionally a "damn," which
appealed to him, I think, as a suitable if not a necessary qualification
of the word "fool." For Mr. Pulitzer there were no fools except damned
fools.
After the excitement about Caesar and Cleopatra had subsided, Mr.
Pulitzer asked me if I had a good memory. I hesitated before replying,
because I had seen enough of Mr. Pulitzer in an hour to realize that a
constant exercise of caution would be necessary if I wished to avoid
offending his prejudices or wounding his susceptibilities; and whereas
on the one hand I did not wish to set a standard for myself which I
would find it impossible to live up to, on the other hand I was anxious
to avoid giving any description of my abilities which would be followed
later by a polite intimation from the major-domo that Mr. Pulitzer had
enjoyed my visit immensely but that I was not just the man for the
place.
So I compromised and said that I had a fairly good memory.
"Well, everybody thinks he's got a good memory," replied Mr. Pulitzer.
"I only claimed a fairly good one," I protested.
"Oh! that's just an affectation; as a matter of fact you think you've
got a splendid memory, don't you? Now, be frank about it; I love people
to be frank with me."
My valor got the better of my discretion, and I replied that if he
really wished me to be frank I was willing to admit that I had no
particular desire to lay claim to a good memory, for I was inclined to
accept the view which I had once heard expressed by a very wise man of
my acquaintance that the human mind was not intended to remember with
but to think with, and that one of the greatest benefits which had been
conferred on mankind by the discovery of printing was that thousands of
things could be recorded for reference which former generations had been
compelled to learn by rote.
"Your wise friend," he cried, "was a damned fool! If you will give the
matter a moment's thought you'll see that memory is the highest faculty
of the human mind. What becomes of all your reading, all your
observation, your experience, study, investigations, discussions--in a
rushing crescendo--if you have no memory?"
"I might reply," I said, "by asking what use it is to lumber up your
mind with a mass of information of which you are only going to make an
occasional use when you can have it filed away in encyclopedias and
other works of reference, and in card indexes, instantly available when
you want it."
I spoke in a light and rather humorous tone in order to take the edge
off my dissent from his opinion, reflecting that even between friends
and equals a demand for frankness is most safely to be regarded as a
danger signal to impulsiveness; but it was too late, I had evidently
overstepped the mark, for Mr. Pulitzer turned abruptly from me without
replying, and began to talk to the gentleman on his left.
This had the twofold advantage of giving me time to reconsider my
strategy, and to eat some dinner, which one of the footmen, evidently
the kind with a memory for former experiences, had set on one side and
kept warm against the moment when I would be free to enjoy it.
As I ate I listened to the conversation. It made my heart sink. The
gentleman to whom Mr. Pulitzer had transferred his attentions was a
Scotchman, Mr. William Romaine Paterson. I discovered later that he was
the nearest possible approach to a walking encyclopedia. His range of
information was--well, I am tempted to say, infamous. He appeared to
have an exhaustive knowledge of French, German, Italian, and English
literature, of European history in its most complicated ramifications,
and of general biography in such a measure that, in regard to people as
well known as Goethe, Voltaire, Kossuth, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Bismarck,
and a score of others, he could fix a precise day on which any event or
conversation had taken place, and recall it in its minutest details.
It was not simply from the standpoint of my own ignorance that
Paterson's store of knowledge assumed such vast proportions, for it was
seldom opened except in the presence of Mr. Pulitzer, in whom were
combined a tenacious memory, a profound acquaintance with the subjects
which Paterson had taken for his province, an analytic mind, and a zest
for contradiction. Everything Paterson said was immediately pounced upon
by a vigorous, astute, and well-informed critic who derived peculiar
satisfaction from the rare instances in which he could detect him in an
inaccuracy.
The conversation between Mr. Pulitzer and Paterson, or, rather,
Paterson's frequently interrupted monologue, lasted until we had all
finished dinner, and the butler had lighted Mr. Pulitzer's cigar. In the
middle of an eloquent passage from Paterson, Mr. Pulitzer rose, turned
abruptly toward me, held out his hand, and said, "I'm very glad to have
met you, Mr. Ireland; you have entertained me very much. Please come
here to-morrow at eleven o'clock, and I'll take you out for a drive.
Good-night." He took Paterson's arm and left the room.
The door, like all the doors in Mr. Pulitzer's various residences, shut
automatically and silently; and after one of the secretaries had drawn a
heavy velvet curtain across the doorway, so that not the faintest sound
could escape from the room, I was chaffed good-naturedly about my debut
as a candidate. To my great surprise I was congratulated on having done
very well.
"You made a great hit," said one, "with your account of Shaw's play."
"I nearly burst out laughing," said another, "when you gave your views
about memory. I think you're dead right about it; but J. P.--Mr.
Pulitzer was always referred to as J. P.--is crazy about people having
good memories, so if you've really got a good memory you'd better let
him find it out."
I was told that, so far as we were concerned, the day's work, or at
least that portion of it which involved being with J. P., was to be
considered over as soon as he retired to the library after dinner. His
object then was to be left alone with one secretary, who read to him
until about ten o'clock, when the major-domo came and took him to his
rooms for the night. As a rule, J. P. made no further demand on the
bodily presence of his secretaries after he had gone to bed, but
occasionally, when he could not sleep, one of them would be called,
perhaps at three in the morning, to read to him.
This meant in practice that, when we were ashore, one, or more usually
two of us, would remain in the house in case of emergency. This did not
by any means imply that we were always free from work after ten o'clock
at night, in fact the very opposite was true, for it was J. P.'s custom
to say, during dinner, that on the following day he would ride, drive,
or walk with such a one or such a one, naming him; and the victim--a
term frequently used with a good deal of surprisingly frank enjoyment by
J. P. himself--had often to work well into the night preparing material
for conversation.
I saw something of what this preparation meant before I left the villa
after my first meeting with J. P. Two of the secretaries said they would
go over to Monte Carlo, and they asked me to go with them; but I
declined, preferring to remain behind for a chat with one of the
secretaries, Mr. Norman G. Thwaites, an Englishman, who was secretary in
a more technical sense than any of the rest of us, for he was a
shorthand writer and did most of J. P.'s correspondence.
After the others had gone he showed me a table in the entrance hall of
the villa, on which was a big pile of mail just arrived from London. It
included a great number of newspapers and weeklies, several copies of
each. There were The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The
Morning Post, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, Truth, The
Spectator, The Saturday Review, The Nation, The Outlook, and some other
London publications, as well as the Paris editions of the New York
Herald and The Daily Mail.
Thwaites selected a copy of each and then led the way to his bedroom, a
large room on the top floor, from which we could see across the bay the
brilliant lights of Monte Carlo.
He then explained to me that he had been selected to read to J. P.
whilst the latter had his breakfast and his after-breakfast cigar the
next morning. In order to do this satisfactorily he had to go over the
papers and read carefully whatever he could find that was suited to J.
P.'s taste at that particular time of the day. During the breakfast hour
J. P. would not have anything read to him which was of an exciting
nature. This preference excluded political news, crime, disaster, and
war correspondence, and left practically nothing but book reviews,
criticisms of plays, operas, and art exhibitions, and publishers'
announcements.
The principal sources of information on these topics were the literary
supplement of the London Times, the Literary Digest, and the literary,
dramatic, and musical columns of the Athenaeum, The Spectator, and the
Saturday Review.
These had to be "prepared," to use J. P.'s phrase, which meant that they
were read over rapidly once and then gone over again with some
concentration so that the more important articles could be marked for
actual reading, the other portions being dealt with conversationally,
everything being boiled down to its essence before it reached Mr.
Pulitzer's ear.
As it was getting late, and as I knew that Thwaites would be on tap
early in the morning, for J. P. usually breakfasted before nine, and the
"victim" was supposed to have had his own breakfast by eight, I left the
villa and went back to the yacht.
As he said good-night, Thwaites gave me a copy of The Daily Telegraph
and advised me to read it carefully, as J. P. might ask me for the day's
news during the drive we were to take the following morning.
Before going to sleep I glanced through The Daily Telegraph and came
across an article which gave me an idea for establishing my reputation
for memory. It was a note about the death duties which had been
collected in England during 1910, and it gave a list of about twenty
estates on which large sums had been paid. The list included the names
of the deceased and also the amounts on which probate duty had been
paid. I decided to commit these names and figures to memory and to take
an occasion the next day to reel them off to J. P.
Punctually at eleven o'clock I presented myself at the villa to find, to
my dismay, J. P. seated in his automobile in a towering rage. What sort
of consideration had I for him to keep him waiting for half an hour!
I protested that eleven o'clock was the hour of the appointment. I was
absolutely wrong, he said, half-past-ten was the time, and he remembered
perfectly naming that hour, because he wanted a long drive and he had an
engagement with Mr. Paterson at noon.
"I'm awfully sorry," I began, "if I misunderstood you, but really..."
He dismissed the matter abruptly by saying, "For God's sake, don't argue
about it. Get in and sit next to me so that I can hear you talk."
As soon as we had got clear of the village, and were spinning along at a
good rate on the Corniche road, which circles the Bay of Monaco, high on
the mountain side, Mr. Pulitzer began to put me through my paces.
"Now, Mr. Ireland," he began, "you will understand that if any
arrangement is to be concluded between us I must explore your brain,
your character, your tastes, your sympathies, your prejudices, your
temper; I must find out if you have tact, patience, a sense of humor,
the gift of condensing information, and, above all, a respect, a love, a
passion for accuracy."
I began to speak, but he interrupted me before I had got six words out
of my mouth.
"Wait! Wait!" he cried, "let me finish what I have to say. You'll find
this business of being a candidate a very trying and disagreeable one;
well, it's damned disagreeable to me, too. What I need is rest, repose,
quiet, routine, understanding, sympathy, friendship, yes, my God! the
friendship of those around me. Mr. Ireland, I can do much, I can do
everything for a man who will be my friend. I can give him power, I can
give him wealth, I can give him reputation, the power, the wealth, the
reputation which come to a man who speaks to a million people a day in
the columns of a great paper. But how am I to do this? I am blind, I'm
an invalid; how am I to know whom I can trust? I don't mean in money
matters; money's nothing to me; it can do nothing for me; I mean
morally, intellectually. I've had scores of people pass through my hands
in the last fifteen years--Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen,
Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, men of so-called high family, men of
humble birth, men from a dozen universities, self-taught men, young men,
old men, and, my God! what have I found? Arrogance, stupidity,
ingratitude, loose thinking, conceit, ignorance, laziness, indifference;
absence of tact, discretion, courtesy, manners, consideration, sympathy,
devotion; no knowledge, no wisdom, no intelligence, no observation, no
memory, no insight, no understanding. My God! I can hardly believe my
own experience when I think of it."
Set down in cold print, this outburst loses almost every trace of its
intensely dramatic character. Mr. Pulitzer spoke as though he were
declaiming a part in a highly emotional play. At times he turned toward
me, his clenched fists raised above his shoulders, at times he threw
back his head, flung his outstretched hands at arms' length in front of
him, as though he were appealing to the earth, to the sea, to the air,
to the remote canopy of the sky to hear his denunciation of man's
inefficiency; at times he paused, laid a hand on my arm, and fixed his
eye upon me as if he expected the darkness to yield him some image of my
thought. It was almost impossible to believe at such a moment that he
was totally blind, that he could not distinguish night from day.
"Mind!" he continued, raising a cautionary finger, "I'm not making any
criticism of my present staff; you may consider yourself very lucky if I
find you to have a quarter of the good qualities which any one of them
has; and let me tell you that while you are with me you will do well to
observe these gentlemen and to try and model yourself on them.
"However, all that doesn't matter so much in your case, because there's
no question of your becoming one of my personal staff. I haven't any
vacancy at present, and I don't foresee any. What I want you for is
something quite different."
Imagine my amazement. No vacancy on the staff! What about the
advertisement I had answered? What about all the interviews and
correspondence, in which a companionship had been the only thing
discussed? What could the totally different thing be of which Mr.
Pulitzer spoke?
In the midst of my confusion Mr. Pulitzer said, "Look out of the window
and tell me what you see. Remember that I am blind, and try and make me
get a mental picture of everything--everything, you understand; never
think that anything is too small or insignificant to be of interest to
me; you can't tell what may interest me; always describe everything with
the greatest minuteness, every cloud in the sky, every shadow on the
hillside, every tree, every house, every dress, every wrinkle on a face,
everything, everything!"
I did my best, and he appeared to be pleased; but before I had half
exhausted the details of the magnificent scene above and below us he
stopped me suddenly with a request that I should tell him exactly what
had occurred from the time I had answered his advertisement up to the
moment of my arrival at the villa.
This demand placed me in rather an awkward predicament, for I had to try
and reconcile the fact that the advertisement itself as well as all my
conversations with his agents and with his son had been directed toward
the idea of a companionship, with his positive assertion that there was
no vacancy on his personal staff and that he wanted me for another, and
an undisclosed purpose. Here was a very clear opportunity for destroying
my reputation, either for tact or for accuracy.
There was, of course, only one thing to do, and that was to tell him
exactly what had taken place. This I did, and at the end of my recital
he said, "It's simply amazing how anyone can get a matter tangled up the
way you have. There was never a question of your becoming one of my
companions. What I want is a man to go out to the Philippines and write
a series of vigorous articles showing the bungle we've made of that
business, and paving the way for an agitation in favor of giving the
Islands their independence. There'll be a chance of getting that done if
we elect a Democratic President in 1912."
"Well, sir," I replied, "if the bungle has been as bad as you think I
certainly ought to be able to do the work to your satisfaction. I'm
pretty familiar with the conditions of tropical life, I've written a
good deal on the subject, I've been in the Philippines and have
published a book and a number of articles about them, and, although I
don't take as gloomy a view as you do about the administration out
there, I found a good deal to criticize, and if I go out I can certainly
describe the conditions as they are now, and your editorial writers can
put my articles to whatever use they may wish."
"You're going too fast," he said, "and you're altogether too cock-sure
of your abilities. You mustn't think that because you've written
articles for the London Times you are competent to write for The World.
It's a very different matter. The American people want something terse,
forcible, picturesque, striking, something that will arrest their
attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate
their imagination, convince their reason, awaken their conscience. Why
should I accept you at your own estimate? You don't realize the
responsibility I have in this matter. The World isn't like your Times,
with its forty or fifty thousand educated readers. It's read by, well,
say a million people a day; and it's my duty to see that they get the
truth; but that's not enough, I've got to put it before them briefly so
that they will read it, clearly so that they will understand it,
forcibly so that they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they
will remember it, and, above all, accurately so that they may be wisely
guided by its light. And you come to me, and before you've been here a
day you ask me to entrust you with an important mission which concerns
the integrity of my paper, the conscience of my readers, the policy of
my country, no, my God! you're too cock-sure of yourself."
By this time Mr. Pulitzer had worked himself up into a state of painful
excitement. His forehead was damp with perspiration, he clasped and
unclasped his hands, his voice became louder and higher-pitched from
moment to moment; but when he suddenly stopped speaking he calmed down
instantly.
"You shouldn't let me talk so much," he said, without, however,
suggesting any means by which I could stop him. "What time is it? Are we
nearly home? Well, Mr. Ireland, I'll let you off for the afternoon; go
and enjoy yourself and forget all about me." Then, as the auto drew up
at the door of the villa, "Come up to dinner about seven and try to be
amusing. You did very well last night. I hope you can keep it up. It's
most important that anyone who is to live with me should have a sense of
humor. I'd be glad to keep a man and pay him a handsome salary if he
would make me laugh once a day. Well, good-by till to-night."