My diary gives glimpses of the busy hive and its queen bee.
January 1st, 1890. Mama down early for breakfast. Her mail was mostly composed of bills. She threw up her hands in mock dismay. J. said, “People ought to send you billets doux instead of billets duns!”
January 14th. John Pickering Putnam proposes my name for membership in the National Club.
This association grew out of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The book made a great furore. I heard Bellamy speak at Tremont Temple that winter. Edward Everett Hale, who introduced him, said,
“Some time ago I wrote a book called ‘How They Lived at Hampton.’ Nobody read it. Mr. Bellamy has written a book on the same theme and everybody has read that.”
January 15th. Lecture from Professor Royce on Kant. He said the modern man of the best sort to-day embodies Kant’s principles, which were that out of pure reason a man should build up for himself a system of ethics, that he should act as if there was a God, and that he should do right always because it was the manliest part to play.
To a “Recollection of Tristan and Isolde”, Mr. Preston giving the music on the piano, Ralph Adams Cram reading a description of the opera.
January 17th. To dine with Mrs. Louis Stackpole, where we met Dr. Holmes. He spoke of the pleasure he had in reading his own poems.
“I have written one hundred,” he said, “and I like thirty.” I asked the names of his favorites.
“‘The Last Leaf’,” he said. “Then perhaps ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and ‘Dorothy Q’.”