ill's
laconic benison had for me a personal appeal. She was, I felt, entirely
and generously right. She had not overstepped the mark at all. Miss
Fraenkel _was_ very nice, but--it has nothing to do with my story. It is
a point of honour with me to put Miss Fraenkel in her place, if I may
express it so without discourtesy, and that place is certainly modest
and inconspicuous. Miss Fraenkel's light was very clear and very bright,
but illuminated only a small area. She wrote an admirable paper and read
it clearly and impressively at the Women's Club on "The Human Touch in
Ostrovsky." Indeed, for one who had read so little of Ostrovsky it was a
most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of the English
character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow
in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first
place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her
to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly,
her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us
three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in
consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak
of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life
could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she
did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the
United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned
small-scale model of the United States.

We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After
the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others
from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us
over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our
accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of
inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty
mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks
to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.

Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to
speak. We might have gone back to England--surely so dire a calamity,
so utter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose.
But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous
sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our
emigration in the