To reach the great living room two stories high we went down a flight of stairs. In one corner stood the table spread for dinner, in another Pretyman’s easel and drawing stand, opposite were Jennie Pretyman’s grand piano, her work basket, and bookcase. There was an enormous open fireplace where logs of silver birch blazed and crackled on a pair of ancient andirons. The windows were too high to allow us to look out. When I saw the room I exclaimed:
“The world forgetting, by the world forgot!”
Pretyman liked this so much that it became the motto of this unique center which was to become a Mecca to the Pilgrims of Art from many lands.
The day’s work over, we gathered round the hearth. When he was in the mood, Pretyman, who was a thirteenth-century Crusader in nineteenth-century clothes, told of his adventures among the Head Hunters of North Borneo when he was British Resident. More often than not he brought a stranger home to dinner, some stray Englishman sorely in need of a friend. How did they all find him? Or did he find them?
“Chicago is like a sieve,” he used to say, “it is the first place that catches the down-and-out British rancher on his way east.”
How many of his stranded countrymen he helped to tide over a bad moment, only he and his wife know.
I once met at their house her cousin, Mary Leiter, afterwards Lady Curzon. They were as like as two sisters, though Jennie Pretyman was the handsomer and more gracious. The likeness went as far as the speech and even the handwriting.
My mother visited us in Chicago while on one of her western lecture tours.
During the greater part of the time of the World’s Fair we were in Chicago. My mother was active in the World’s Parliament of Religion and I had the pleasant task of editing a volume on the work of women at the Columbian Exposition.
1890 saw our return to Boston and to my mother’s house where I took up my old position as “boss.” Nothing was changed; each day was still too short for the task and frolic it brought. The clan constantly rallied round the old Chieftainess; children, grandchildren, relatives, “near” relatives, distinguished strangers, poor things in need of a bed, a meal, a cup of tea, a “jollying”! How did she do it? In these inhospitable post-war days it seems incredible.