Mr. James ranked among us as chief of Owls. He was very lame and used a great cane with a yellow ivory handle. He had a long gray beard, piercing eyes that looked you through and through, and a laugh so hearty, so contagious that it healed the stab of the too bright eyes. I was at once fascinated and frightened by him. My mother was in terror lest I should find out that he had a wooden leg, for he often took me on his knee and quizzed me. Once when I had been haled in from a romp in the garden with a torn pinafore and a general devil-may-care look about me, Mr. James said quite seriously:
“Maud, you are the wickedest-looking thing I have seen for a long time.”
I took this literally, brooded over the affront, and gave him a Roland for his Oliver:
“You are the ugliest man I have ever seen!”
Mr. James was hurt; this troubled my mother; but my own feelings had been outraged. Wounded in my self-esteem, I had instinctively “struck back”, as a child or savage does. He was so wise, so tender, that I believe he forgave me, though I have never forgiven myself.
In these early memories, the “James boys” figure as the friends of my older sisters. I have no recollection of them in connection with myself till much later. I have, however, a clear impression of their cousin, Minnie Temple, with whom Henry James, the younger, was said to be in love. I think of her delicate face, luminous eyes, and expression of haunting melancholy, as of things seen in a dream. Willie and Wilkie; Henry and Bobby; their names fit into the picture of this time, because my elders talked so much of them. Two went to the war, Wilkie and Bobby; one was wounded.
It probably was about this time that Henry and Willie were studying art in the Newport studio of William Hunt, with John La Farge and Theodora Sedgwick for fellow pupils. This studio still survives. It stands back from Church Street, just behind what is now the Hill Top Inn, then the home of the William, and later of the Richard, Hunts. Until quite lately, I should have said I had no recollection of Mrs. James, wife of the first Henry and mother of the second, but I happened to pass a night at Concord, in the house of Mrs. Robertson James, and there I recognized a portrait of Mrs. James. The face is calm, motherly, and, above all, aristocratic.
The Radical Club, which met on the first Monday of every month, was one of the chief gathering places of the Owls. I remember my mother’s interest in these meetings, and little bits of her talk about them:
“To-day Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion. He told this anecdote: ‘Somebody said to the Reverend Dr. Payson of Portland, “How much you must enjoy religion, since you live always administering it,” he replied that nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as nobody enjoyed food less than cooks.’”
William Rounseville Alger, prince of Owls, was tolerated by me as the father of my dear friend, Kitty Alger, a handsome girl, with fine black hair which she wore “down her back” in three thick braids. She was like her mother, gentle and domestic. The elder daughter, Abbie, was more like her father. She was intelligent, with a gift for languages, which she put to good account in translating foreign books for the Boston publishers.