He was playing golf in May, 1902, with Ian Gail when the English playwright checked his grammar. Mark flushed. The Englishman fooled with a putter for a second, considering this colour. He said, “I say, old son, d’you mind my giving you some advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“Carlson’s closing the play next week, he tells me. What will you do with yourself, all summer?”
“Go home.”
“Where’s that and what’s it like?”
Mark sat down on the green and chattered of the farm, and his family with particular mention of his nephew George Dewey Bernamer (born May 15, 1898) who called himself Gurdy. About Joe Walling’s baby daughter Mark wasn’t as yet enthusiastic. He talked with broad lapses into New Jersey singsong. His grey eyes dilated. He babbled like an upset pail. The lean Englishman didn’t seem bored. Other people—Mrs. LeMoyne, old Mrs. Gilbert—had scolded Mark about these explosions. Gail let him talk for twenty minutes of warm noon and then said, “Quite right, old son. Stick to your people.... You’re a sentimental ass, of course. I dare say that’s why you can put up with dinner at Carlson’s in that seething mass of red plush.”
“But I like Mr. Carlson. Been mighty good—”
“Of course he’s good to you. And it was good of you to make him mount my last act so decently.... For some reason or other you’ve an eye for decoration. That’s by the way.—Now, I’ve a female cousin in Winchester, a Mrs. Ilden. She writes bad novels that no one reads and her husband’s in the Navy. I’m going to write her about you. You run across after the play stops. She’ll put you up for a month and you’ll pay her—I suggest a hundred pounds.”
“Pay her for what?”
“Her conversation, my boy. She’s quite clever and fearfully learned. Shaw likes her. She’s an anarchist and a determinist and all that and much older than you. She makes a business of tutoring youngsters who need—doing over a bit. You seem to have been reared on Henty and Shakespeare. Even Carlson says you need pruning. There’s no use being antediluvian even if you are a rising young leading man.... God, how I hate the breed! I shouldn’t waste these words on you if you didn’t show vagrom gleams of common sense now and then. So I most seriously beg of you to go and let Olive—Mrs. Ilden, tutor you for a fortnight.”