“It was very moving—it really was,” she wrote to J. P. T.—“because of the evident kindness and sincerity of it. I got through fairly well, though I don’t feel that I have yet arrived at the right speech for a public dinner.... I was most interested by the speech of the City Superintendent of Education, Dr. Maxwell, an admirable man, who declared hotly in my favour as to Play Centres, and has, since the dinner, given directions for the first afternoon Play Centre for school children in New York. Isn’t that jolly!
‘Well, and since, we have been lunching, dining and seeing sights with the same vigour. I have been to schools and manual training centres with Dr. Maxwell, and we went through the Natural History Museum with its Director,[28] who gave us a thrilling time.... One afternoon I went down to a College Settlement and spoke to a large gathering of workers about English ways. The day before yesterday I spoke to about 900 boys and girls and their teachers, in one of their magnificent public schools. Dr. Maxwell took me, and asked me to speak of Grandpapa. A great many of the elder boys had read Tom Brown and knew all about the ‘Doctor’! I enjoyed it greatly, and as to their saluting of the flag—these masses of alien children—one may say what one will, but it is one of the most thrilling things in the world, and we, as a nation, are the poorer for not having it.”
Mrs. Ward had accepted four or five engagements to lecture while she was in America, in aid of her London Play Centres, and accumulated, to her intense satisfaction, the handsome sum of £250 from this source during her tour. She gave her audiences of her best—the paper already mentioned, on “The Peasant in Literature,” which revealed her literary craft in its most finished form, and although she was so much the rage at the time that her admirers were not disposed to be critical, she was yet genuinely gratified by the pleasure which this paper gave, especially in so cultivated a centre as Philadelphia. Here Mrs. Ward and her daughter were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Earle Coates, and then of the Bertram Lippincotts, in their charming house outside the town. Independence Hall gave them the proper thrill of sympathy with a “nation struggling to be free,” while Mrs. Ward was delighted by the general old-world look of many of the streets, no less than by the stately river, on which, as she found to her astonishment, “the boat-crews practise for Henley.” During their short stay with Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Ward made friends with Dr. Weir Mitchell, novelist and physician, and with Miss Agnes Repplier, for whom she felt an instant attraction, while Dorothy sat next to a Mr. Walter Smith, and talked to him innocently about certain Modernist lectures that had been given at the Settlement in London, discovering afterwards, to her dismay, that he was a strong Catholic, and freely called in Philadelphia “Helbeck of Bannisdale.” “I noticed it fell a little flat!”
From Philadelphia they moved on to Washington, to stay with their old friends the Bryces, at the hospitable British Embassy. An invitation from the President (Mr. Roosevelt) to dine with him at the White House, had already reached them. Mrs. Ward described her impressions in a long letter to her son:
“WASHINGTON,
”April 13, 1908.
‘Everybody here has been kindness itself, and we feel that we ought to spend the rest of our days in trying to be nice to Americans in London! First, as you know, we went to the Bryces. They asked a great many people to meet us, but what I remember best is a quiet hour with Mr. and Mrs. Root, who were smuggled into an inner drawing-room away from the crowd, where one could listen to him in peace, and above all, look at him! He is, I think, the most attractive of all the Americans we have seen. He has been Secretary of State now for some years, and is evidently, like Edward Grey, absorbed in his own special work and not much concerned with current politics. His subordinates speak of him with enthusiasm, and he has a detached, humane, meditative face, with a slight flicker of humour perpetually playing over it—as different as possible from the hawk-like concentration of the New Yorkers. We have seen most of the Cabinet and high officials, and I have particularly liked Mr. Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Metcalf, Secretary for the Navy, and Mr. Bacon, Assistant Secretary of State. Saturday’s dinner at the White House was delightful, only surpassed by the little round-table dinner of eight last night at Mr. Henry Adams’s, where the President took me in and talk was fast and free—altogether a memorable evening. At the White House I did not sit near the President, everything being regulated by a comparatively strict etiquette and precedence—but after dinner he sent word that I was to sit by him in the ballroom, at the little concert which followed, and when the music was over, he and I plunged into all sorts of things, ending up with religion and theology! Last night he talked politics, socialism, divorce, large and small families, the Kaiser, Randolph Churchill, the future of wealth in this country (he wants to lop all the biggest fortunes by some form of taxation—pollard them like trees)—the future of marriage and a few other trifles of the same kind. He is, of course, an egotist, but an extraordinarily well-meaning and able one, with all the virtues and failings of his natural character and original bringing-up, exaggerated now and produced on what one might almost call a colossal scale, which strikes the American imagination. He honestly doesn’t want a third term, and has set his mind on Taft for his successor, but it must be hard for such a man to step down from such a post into the ordinary opportunities of life. However, as he says, and apparently sincerely, ‘we mustn’t break the Washington tradition.’
“To-day we are going out to Mount Vernon, and to-night there is another dinner-party. Washington is a most beautiful place—the Capitol a really glorious building that any nation might be proud of, and the shining White House, with its graceful pillared front, among its flowering trees and shrubs, makes me think with shame of that black abortion, Buckingham Palace!”
It was a special pleasure to them also to see something of M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, and his charming wife, and to renew a friendship which had endured since their early days in London. But above all it was the leaders of American politics that impressed Mrs. Ward.
“Root, Garfield, Taft,” she wrote to Miss Arnold, of Fox How, “these and several others of the leading men attracted and impressed me greatly—beyond what I had expected. Indeed, I think one of the main impressions of this visit has been the inaccuracy of our common idea in England that American women of the upper class are as a rule superior to the men. It may be true among a certain section of the rich business class, but amongst the professional, educated and political people it is not true at all.”
Boston, of course, claimed Mrs. Ward on her way to Canada, and adopted her in whole-hearted fashion. She was by this time a little tired of “receptions” of five and six hundred persons, all passing before her as in a dream and shaking a hand which was never free from writer’s cramp. “But the touching thing is the distance people come—one lame lady came 300 miles!—it made me feel badly—and all the Unitarian ministers for thirty miles round have been asked and are said to be coming on Tuesday next!” When they came, Mrs. Ward enjoyed the occasion particularly, and wrote home that she had “had to make a speech, but got through better than usual by dint of talking of T. H. Green.” An elderly bookseller among them, who had written to her regularly about each of her books for the last twenty years, now met her and spoke with her at last; he went away contented. But the real delights of her stay at Boston were her visits to Harvard and Radcliffe, and her intercourse with the Nortons at Shady Hill, and with Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett at the former’s house. Here she met the fine old veteran, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” who had lately brought out her memoirs. Mrs. Ward had been somewhat wickedly amused by certain passages in the latter: “Imagine Mrs. Ward Howe declaring in public that a poem of hers, which a critic had declared to be ‘in pitiable hexameters’ (English, of course), was not ‘in hexameters at all—it was in pentameters of my own make—I never followed any special school or rule!’ I have been gurgling over that in bed this morning.” But when they met, Mrs. Ward capitulated. “By the way, I retract about Mrs. Howe. Her book is rather foolish, but she herself is an old dear—full of fun at ninety, and adored here. She lunched with Mrs. Fields to-day en petit comité, and was most amusing.”