The explanation was, of course, that in the interval I had
found myself, and was no longer afraid to talk to Henry James of the
things that interested us both; while he, most generous of men, when he
as somtimes found I was not merely a fashion-plate doll, at once exerted his singul-
 faculty of drawing his interlocutor's inmost self to the surface. But-
 the end it was perhaps our common sense of fun that first led us
link together. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people
to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so
that their joint glances to any subject cross like interarching search-
lights. I have had good friends between whom and myself that bond was
lacking, but never intimate friends; and in that sense Henry James was
perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had, though in other ways we so
so often different.

838

Great man. But it was in memory of those amiable but high disciplined people that better the President & his friends should carelessly omit a single move. After all, traditional fans they had been united to play with him.

It was once at Sapporo - I think it was there that I saw Theodore Roosevelt in the last time. They could not have been a filter setting for what turned out to be an pool; for it was at Sapporo that the least known side of his character was revealed, & Ranchero & Statesman both made way for the private man, passionate absorbed in books & nature, all the quiet delights of a country life. What a good day that was! My husband & I

husband and I went down to lunch, finding there no one but the family (and, as in my own house, the term included two or three busy and extremely interested dogs). The house was like one big library, and the whole tranquil place breathed of the love of books and of nature, so that I felt immediately at home there. After luncheon the President, with a good deal of simple amusement, showed us the series of photographs taken of himself and the Emperor William during the German manoeuvres. He was perfectly aware of the studied impertinence of the Kaiser's famous inscription on one of the photographs - it read, I think: "President Roosevelt shows the Emperor of Germany how to command an attack", or something of the kind - but he treated it as an imperial appeal to his sense of humour, which it probably was.