urse her mother, was forced to enter upon a season of unveracity
which taxed her imagination to the uttermost. She had to pretend that
Jean was away on a visit, or that she was in town shopping or away at a
dinner. Together we invented all kinds of social engagements for her and
that involved the description of new gowns and a list of the guests of
each entertainment. Oh, it was dreadful. Fortunately Clara had a good
reputation with her mother, and was able to carry conviction, whereas I
had a very hard time. I kept getting into shoal water."

He was very funny--I can only report the substance of his tale--and yet
there was a tone in his voice which enabled me to understand the tragic
situation. Mrs. Clemens' illness was hopeless.

All through the dinner he talked on in the same enthralling fashion,
picturesque, humorous, tragic. He dealt with June bugs, alcohol,
Christian Science, the Philippine outrage and a dozen other apparently
unrelated subjects. He imitated a horse-fly. He swore. He quoted poetry.
We laughed till our sides ached--and yet, all the while, beneath it all,
he had in mind (as we had in mind)--that sweetly-patient invalid waiting
upstairs for his good-night caress.

As a bitter agnostic as well as a tender humorist Mark Twain loomed
larger in my horizon after that night. The warmly human side of him was
revealed to me as never before, and thereafter I knew him and I felt
that he knew me. That remote glance from beneath those shaggy eyebrows
no longer deceived me. He was a tender and loyal husband. Later when I
came to read the marvelous story of his life as related by Albert
Bigelow Paine, I found a part of my intuitions recorded as facts. He was
an elemental western American--with many of the faults and all of the
excellencies of the border.

Meanwhile I was at work. In my diary of this date I find these words,
"This is living! The sunlight floods our tiny sitting-room whose windows
look out on a blue-and-white mountainous 'scape of city roofs. We have
dined and the steam is singing in our gilded radiator. The noise and
bustle of the city is far away.--I foresee that I shall be able to do a
great deal of work on my novel."

In that last sentence I was reckoning without the effect of my wife's
popularity. Invitations to luncheons, dinners, and theater parties began
to pile up, and I could not ask Zulime to deny herself these pleasures,
although I tried to keep my forenoons sacred to my pen. I retur