And of course he would find amusement in his condition. He said:
“I have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the first time, I have got a genuine excuse. It makes me feel so honest.”
And once, when Jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said:
“Jean, I can't see her. Tell her I am likely to drop dead any minute and it would be most embarrassing.”
But he did see her, for it was a poet—Angela Morgan—and he read her poem, “God's Man,” aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her to Collier's Weekly.
He still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather inclusively, as an idiot, he said:
“I wish to God the lightning would strike me; but I've wished that fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. I have missed several good chances. Mrs. Clemens was afraid of lightning, and would never let me bare my head to the storm.”
The element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent and less frequent.
I was at Stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally alone; for Jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors, seldom appeared except at meal-times. Occasionally she joined in the billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not great. She would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the science of angles as she had mastered tennis and French and German and Italian. She had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her friend.
Katie Leary, who had been Jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child, Jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the Lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she had said: