un-parliamentary language, telling him that nothing would induce me to
lock my door, and after an unsuccessful attempt to settle down, I turned
on the light and read "If Winter Comes."

The originality and pathos of this wonderful study reduced me to tears
and, more dead than alive, at 5.30 a.m. I told my maid I would have my
bath.

The reporters at Chicago were very civil and, interspersed with
flash-lights, I got through the interviews as well as I could. One of
the young ladies, following me to the lift, said:

"I wish you hadn't been so charming and polite. I would like you to have
just rushed at me and pulled my hair out so that I could have got the
story."

I looked at her in surprise and disgust as Mr. Horton elbowed me into
the lift.

I dined that night with a very old friend of mine, Count Minotto, and
met the first woman of real beauty that I have seen since I came here.
Mrs. Minotto walked into the room with long white arms and a
transparently pale face; her dark hair brushed in waves off her
forehead was knotted loosely at the back of her neck, and her beautiful
eyes glowed with welcome. We talked _a trois_ for three hours and before
going away she took me into her night nursery. The nurse woke up, but
her lady told her not to move, and after looking at a handsome little
boy, she glided to the side of a white cradle. Very tall, in a clinging
black crepe dress, I was struck by the beauty of her attitude, and the
tenderness of her expression as, leaning across the cot, she removed the
coverlet for me to see her little sleeping baby.

I lectured the next night to the biggest and most intelligent audience I
had faced since Boston, and when it was over people came on to the stage
to congratulate me and ask for my autograph.

On the morning of the 22nd, having asked to see the big Military
Hospital, a friend of Mr. Horton's--who had been his secretary during
his Foreign Office work in Paris--took us out to see the Speedway
Hospital.

We had a long and adventurous drive, skidding in circles on the ice,
although we went at an almost funereal pace. Puffs of steam came up from
my feet which seemed to emerge from a furnace. Mr. Horton insisted on
stopping at a garage for fear the car would catch fire, and our
chauffeur in a rough-and-ready manner poured cans of water down the
window spaces to do what he could to cool the car.

On arriving at the hospital we were greeted by interviewers and doctors
(the lat