Though for many years she left the housekeeping to the daughter or granddaughter who was living with her, she always kept her own bank account and never allowed any one to take charge of her finances. She often lamented that her hands were so useless for household tasks, envying her granddaughters’ dexterity with scissors and needle. I must not forget to mention her practising. She had a beautiful voice which had been carefully trained in the old Italian method. She practised her scales regularly all her life; I have often heard her say she believed the exercise of singing was very valuable in preparing her for public speaking. She was faithful too in practising on the piano, and always played her scales so that her fingers never lost their flexibility or the power to do the things she really wanted them to do—to hold the pen (she almost never dictated, but wrote everything with her own hand), to play the piano, to accompany her speaking with appropriate gestures. To the last her hands retained their exquisite shape; the cast made from them after death shows their unimpaired beauty. My father was very strict about diet; all “fried abominations” were taboo with him, pastry, high seasoning, ham, cocoanut cakes—all rich food—were anathema maranatha. From first to last she was frankly a rebel in this matter. It was said, in the family, that she had the digestion of an ostrich. In spite of all opposition she calmly continued to eat whatever she fancied to the end of her life. During her last summer she wrote to her physician asking permission to eat ham and pastry, dishes that to her daughters seemed a little heavy for summer weather. At her last luncheon party she was advised not to eat pâté de foies gras or to drink champagne; she put aside the advice with the familiar remark we all knew so well:
“I have taken these things all my life and they have never hurt me.”
The fact of the matter was, she had a perfect digestion which she used carefully and never abused. She ate moderately and slowly, with an entire disregard to what is usually considered good for old people. She rose at seven; in her youth and middle age she took a cold bath, in later years the bath was tepid—well or ill, it was never omitted. During the last twenty years, that great fourth score so rich in happiness to herself and her family, and that greater family of hers, the Public, she took a little light wine with her dinner, “for her stomach’s sake,” as she would say, quoting St. Paul. This, with a cup of tea for breakfast, was the only stimulant she needed, for her spirits were so buoyant, her temperament so overflowing with the joie de vivre, that we called her the “family champagne.” Breakfast with us was a social meal; there was always conversation and much laughter for she came down in the morning with her spirits at their highest level. She slept about eight hours. Until her seventieth year I never knew her to lie down in the daytime, unless she was suffering with headache. The first part of that seventieth year was not a good time for her. More hearty healthy people are killed every year by the sentence: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten,” than by any four diseases you like to name. Even her radiant health, her buoyant temperament felt its depressing influence; as the weeks and months went by and she found herself quite as vigorous in her seventieth year as she had been in her sixty-ninth, she forgot all about her age and resumed her activities, retaining under protest the daily nap. She lay down with the clock on the bed beside her; twenty minutes was quite time enough to “waste in napping!” During the last five or six years, always grudgingly, she gave a little more time to resting, taking a half-hour’s siesta before luncheon, another before dinner, “to rest her back.” She always sat in a straight backed chair, never in her long life having learned how to “lounge” in an easy chair. She was by nature a night owl and never wanted to go to bed if there was any other night owl to keep her company. So much for her use of that faithful servant, the body. If the development of her muscles was not quite up to the modern standard, her intellectual training far surpassed it. From first to last she kept her mind in the same state of high training that the athlete keeps his body, strove for that perfect balance of power in all the different functions of the brain that an all-round athlete aims for in his physique. I never remember a time when she relaxed the mental gymnastics that kept her mind strong, supple, active.
Once, at a crucial moment, when beset by perplexities, I asked for advice, her answer, stamped on my memory as long as it shall hold together, was given in three Latin words:
“Posce fortem animum.” Ask for a strong mind! The motto of her English friend, Edward Twistleton, known and loved by her generation of Bostonians.
Ask for a strong mind; ask earnestly enough and you will get it, will learn to laugh at that old-fashioned bogey, the fear of being considered “strong-minded.”
Long ago, when a silly acquaintance demanded if it was true she was a strong-minded woman, she parried with the counter thrust:
“Is it not better to be strong-minded than to be weak-minded?”
If you want a strong mind or a strong body there is only one way to get it, by faithful exercise. There is no royal road, no easy short cut to either goal. The wise friend, the good physician can point out the way, you yourself must tread it!
She always read her letters and the newspapers (history in the making) immediately after breakfast. Then came the morning walk, a bout of calisthenics, or a game of ball; after this she settled to the real serious business of the day; ten o’clock saw her at her desk. She began the morning with study, took up the hardest reading she had on hand. In her youth she read Goethe; in her middle life, when she was deep in the study of German philosophy, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. For years Kant was the most intimate companion of her thought. In the early sixties, when she was in the forties, her diary was filled with Kant’s philosophy. Sometimes she differs with his conclusions, sometimes amplifies them, oftenest endorses them.