“What did you do?”
“I hit him, and he hit me back. He said, ‘Your mother’s a jailbird,’ and I said, ‘She’s not.’ Then another fellow said, ‘My mother says your mother went to jail too.’”
Grant had replied, “That wasn’t my mother, that was another Margaret Sanger.”
“How could you say that, Grant? You know it wasn’t true.”
“Mother,” he replied profoundly, “you could never make those fellows understand.”
Chapter Twenty-one
THUS TO REVISIT
The event of my visit to London in 1920 was the beginning of my friendship with H. G. Wells. There was no aloofness or coldness in approaching him, no barriers to break down as with most Englishmen; his twinkling eyes were like those of a mischievous boy. I was pleased to find he had no beard and no white hair, because it seemed to me I had heard of him since I had begun to think at all.
Wells had ranged every field of knowledge, had dared to invade the sacrosanct precincts of the historian, the economist, and the scientist and, though a layman in these fields, had used his extraordinary gifts to interpret the past and present and even prophesy the future; in novel after novel he had shocked England by championing women’s right to a freer life.
We in the United States were just beginning to be affected by sociological concepts; only Henry George and Edward Bellamy had previously opened up this new world of the imagination. Now here was Wells giving a fresh picture of what could be if man had an ideal system of society that was workable. At Columbia Colony he had been quoted repeatedly. On my lecture tour in 1916 his name had been on everybody’s lips, and he had signed the letter to President Wilson protesting against the Federal indictment. I believed he had influenced the American intelligentsia more than any other one man.
For good reason countless faithful friends had attached themselves to Wells, and he included in his varied, intricate, and unpredictable personality a capacity for loyally loving both individuals and humanity.