MacDowell I appeared
but a rusty-coat. I sang small. Fortunately for me they were both not
only loyal friends but devoted husbands.

I remembered saying to Zulime as we came away: "America need not despair
of her art so long as she has two such personalities as Edward MacDowell
and Frank Norris."

Edwin Booth's daughter, Mrs. Grossman, who was living at this time in a
handsome apartment on Eighteenth Street, was one of those who liked my
wife, and an invitation to take tea with her produced in me a singular
and sudden reversal to boyish timidity, for to me she had almost the
quality of royalty. I thought of her as she had looked to me, fifteen
years before, when on the occasion of Edwin Booth's last performance of
_Macbeth_ in Boston, she sat in the stage-box with her handsome young
husband, and applauded her illustrious father.

"An enormous audience was present," I explained to Zulime, "and most of
us were deeply interested in the radiant figure of that happy girl. To
me she was a princess, and I observed that as the curtain rose after
each act and the great tragedian came forth to bow, his eyes sought his
daughter's glowing face. Each time the curtain fell his final glance was
upon her. Her small hands seemed the only ones whose sound had value in
his ears."

How remote, how royal, how unattainable she had appeared to me that
night! Now here she was a kindly, charming hostess, the mother of a
family who regarded me as "a distinguished author." To make that radiant
girl in the stage box and my lovely hostess coalesce was difficult, but
as I studied her profile and noted the line of her expressive lips I was
able to relate her to the princely player whose genius I had worshiped
from the gallery.

It will be evident to the reader that life in New York pleased me better
than life in West Salem or even in Chicago, and I would gladly have
stayed on till spring, but Zulime decided to go back to Chicago, and
this we did about the first of February.

The last of the many notable entertainments in which my wife shared was
an open meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which I
had helped to found), where she met many of the leading writers and
artists of the city. Howells, who presided over the program, was
especially fine, restrained, tactful yet quietly authoritative, and when
I told him that our wedding journey was nearly over he expressed a
regret which was highly flattering to us both. At one o'clock