ed him, satisfied him. "Chicago suits me,"
he asserted, "and besides I can't afford to run away from my job. You
should be the last man to admit defeat, _you_ who have been preaching
local color and local patriotism all your days."

In truth Taft was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago
for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had
no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I
permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some
degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me
to dinner even if they did not read my books.

The claims of Chicago upon me had been strengthened by the presence of
Professor Taft who had given up his home in Kansas and was now settled
not far from his son and near the University. He had brought all his
books and other treasures with intent to spend the remaining years of
his life in the neighborhood of his illustrious son and his two
daughters, a fact which I could not overlook in any plans for changing
my own residence.

Don Carlos Taft was a singular and powerful figure, as I have already
indicated, a stoic, of Oriental serenity, one who could smile in the
midst of excruciating pain. With his eyes against a blank wall he was
able to endlessly amuse himself by calling up the deep-laid concepts of
his earlier years of study. Though affected with some obscure spinal
disorder which made every movement a punishment, he concealed his
suffering, no matter how intense it might be, and always answered,
"Fine, fine!" when any of us asked "How are you to-day?"

He lived in Woodlawn as he had lived in Kansas, like a man in a diving
bell. His capacious brain filled with "knowledges" of the days when
Gladstone was king and Darwin an outlaw, had little room for the
scientific theories of Bergson and his like. He remained the
old-fashioned New England theologian converted to militant agnosticism.

Although at this time over seventy years of age his mind was notably
clear, orderly and active, and his talk (usually a carefully constructed
monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and
retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional
expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an
intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters,
music possessed no interest for him.

He had read, I believe, one or two of my books but never alluded