I feel very lonely, Dick is in New Jersey.
Friday April 22, 1921.
Paul Hanna, a friend of Kenneth Durant’s, asked me to lunch, he and Mrs Hanna (everyone is married in America—however young) came to fetch me. We went to a restaurant near by where we found our party, among whom, with his wife, was Sinclair Lewis, the author of the much-discussed “Main Street.” The restaurant we lunched in was rather cleverly decorated, so that one had the impression of having a tent awning overhead, and being surrounded by Italian stone walls with vases, and a peacock was silhouetted against a sapphire blue sky. The proportions of the room, and the height of the roof lent themselves to this treatment. I was informed that it had been recently converted from a Baptist Chapel! How strange we Christians are! No oriental would thus desecrate his temple. The party amused themselves at my expense, telling American humor stories, which I couldn’t laugh at. I said I didn’t think the American paper Life was funny, they admitted they didn’t think so either, but that twenty out of a hundred jokes in Punch compensated for the other eighty. It was a funny party—I knew what train of thought Paul Hanna represented, but I wonder if the others did.
After lunch most of us went off to the bookshop and I exchanged “Mayfair to Moscow” for “Main Street,” duly autographed.
I went to tea with Mrs. William Hard where a great many people drifted in and out. Among them Alice Longworth, with whom I made a date, and Mrs. Brandeis and her daughter, who invited me to go to tea on the morrow to meet Mr. Justice Brandeis. I have a great curiosity to see him, I have heard his name over and over again. Everyone says to me, “You should do a head of Brandeis.” I am told he looks like Lincoln. Innumerable people tell me also that I should do a head of Mr. Baruch. “The replete eagle with a kindly eye” as someone here described him to me. If he were only poor, and nobody, he would probably consent to sit to me, and be quite happy doing so. This lack of vanity in man is new to me. I have never met it before, I do not understand it. There are types in this country not only fine physically, and interesting, but there is the brain, the force and the power of achievement behind it.
Soukine fetched me for dinner at Countess Gizycka’s. Senator Edge took me in to dinner—I was sent in first as the guest of honor. On my other side was Mr. Lowry, whom I had met at tea at Mrs. Hard’s. We stumbled in the course of conversation on a mutual friendship with Henry James. It happened by chance, but it was a happy chance. He loved Henry as all Henry’s friends did. He nursed him through his last illness. Mr. Lowry had not guessed that I was the Sheridan to whom the best of Henry James’ letters are written in the last volume. That tag of Soviet Russia which is tied tightly round my neck had obliterated any idea of my being anyone else! We talked of Rye, and of my own home, and the mention of Brede Place recalled to my vision spring in England, the peace and the remoteness of Sussex; “so far away,” as Mr. Lowry said. So far away, indeed, that it seems like another world, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get back there.
I met “Mr. Baker of the Mint” as he was described to me when I asked who he was. A man with a very fine, characteristically American face, and a charming personality. Later, when everyone else went on to a ball, Mr. Baker took me for a drive in his car before dropping me at the Shoreham. I asked him what Mr. Baker he was, whether he was the Mr. Baker of the Wilson Administration. He obviously was laughing at my ignorance and explained that he was just plain Mr. Baker, although he had been in the Wilson Administration, but that he had always been simply Mr. Baker, and still was the same, and not a very important person—not important enough, for instance, to have his head done! By which, I suppose, he means that he is not Secretary for War Baker—? Whoever he is, (and I suppose I shall learn in time about people in Washington, just as I have in time learnt about people in New York!) I like him, I like his face, and I like his talk, although he is “the man of the mint” who refuses to buy Soviet gold. I asked him why, “Is it because you are a very high principled man and you feel the gold belongs to someone else?”
“I am a high principled man but it is not for any principle that I will not buy Soviet gold—.”
“So much the better,” I said, “there will be more for England and we want it—and it will come to you just the same I suppose in the end, only it will come through us—!”
At that moment we passed by what seemed in the night to be columns of a Greek temple standing out against the night blue. It was the Lincoln Memorial. We drove along the river which looked mysterious and beautiful with its bridges and reflected lights. As we flashed by the lights of the lamps I saw azaleas of every color, banks of them. The night was as warm as any in an English summer.