"I have done pretty well in business but I never crushed anybody."
The Mills hotels were an expression of his sentiment toward the society amid which he lived; to the environment which had given him his later opportunities. He wanted to enlarge the opportunities of other men, to sweeten their lives a little, to enable them to do more for themselves. His scheme was derided and was a success from the start, and the success has grown greater ever since. The success was due to the patience with which he thought out his plans. The afternoon before I sailed from New York, in 1906, I met Mr. Mills in his victoria at the door of the Metropolitan Club. "Come for a drive in the park," he said, and we went. He began at once to talk about his new hotel. We drove for two hours and during nearly all that time he discussed plans, estimates, details, methods of economical working, organization, the effect on the tenants, and a hundred other matters relating to the building, equipment, and operation of the hotel soon to be erected.
He had all the facts and figures in his mind. He talked with an enthusiasm he rarely showed. His heart was in it.
To the last his energies seemed inexhaustible; and his interests. He arrived one afternoon at Dorchester House at five o'clock from New York. There was a large dinner at 8.30, then a ball which he did not leave till toward one in the morning. I met him again at tea next day and he told me he had been at the White City since nine that morning, and when I suggested that he had gone about that marvellous but very fatiguing show in a chair, he said: "Oh, no, on my legs." Nor did he seem tired nor mind the prospect of another large dinner that night. He was then eighty-two years old. Pneumonia had attacked him winter after winter, but he always rallied and would take no better care of himself than before.
In that slight, erect figure Nature had packed powers of endurance which bigger frames had not. Everything was reduced to its essence. There was nothing superfluous and nothing wanting. The features were sculptured. It was the face of a man who had a real distinction of nature; who had benignity and judgment and acute perceptions all in equal measure. They bore the stamp of an impregnable integrity, as his life did. Unlike qualities in him melted into harmony and a rounded whole. For with his unyielding firmness and strength and uncompromising convictions and invincible sense of justice went a loving kindness which made him the most lovable of men. That was Mr. Mills.
CHAPTER XXXIV
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL—BEING MOSTLY PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS
I
I venture on an anecdote or two, which I have told elsewhere but imperfectly, those whom it concerns being now dead or retired. They were three; Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Mr. Archibald Forbes; all at that moment in the splendour, the blinding splendour, of their gifts and powers. It was after luncheon. The ladies had gone. Lord Randolph had been Secretary of State for India, and Forbes, like Lord Randolph, had lately been in India, and the talk turned upon India. All three were men who spoke their minds; not at all an uncommon practice in this country, where men dissent freely, and even bluntly, from the expressed opinion of others, and no offence taken. Lord Randolph and Forbes differed sharply. Neither stood in awe of the other, or of any man. Forbes would make a statement. Lord Randolph would answer: