He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs. Clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey:
“If I had been there a minute earlier, it is possible—it is possible that she might have died in my arms. Sometimes I think that perhaps there was an instant—a single instant—when she realized that she was dying and that I was not there.”
In New York I had once brought him a print of the superb “Adams Memorial,” by Saint-Gaudens—the bronze woman who sits in the still court in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington.
On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast, he said:
“Engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the Saint-Gaudens bronze.”
It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such a visit. We entered the little inclosure of cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of the great human mystery of life and death. Instinctively we removed our hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. Then:
“What does he call it?” he asked.
I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that great line of Shakespeare's—“the rest is silence.”
“But that figure is not silent,” he said.
And later, as we were driving home: