e, or some other correspondent. His pen flew over the paper
with the utmost rapidity and the Ambassador would sometimes keep at his
writing until two or three o'clock in the morning. There is a frequently
expressed fear that letter writing is an art of the past; that the
intervention of the stenographer has destroyed its spontaneity; yet it
is evident that in Page the present generation has a letter writer of
the old-fashioned kind, for he did all his writing with his own hand and
under circumstances that would assure the utmost freshness and vividness
to the result.

An occasional game of golf, which he played badly, a trip now and then
to rural England--these were Page's only relaxations from his duties.
Though he was not especially fond of leaving his own house, he was
always delighted when visitors came to him. And the American Embassy,
during the five years from 1913 to 1918, extended a hospitality which
was fittingly democratic in its quality but which gradually drew within
its doors all that was finest in the intellect and character of
England. Page himself attributed the popularity of his house to his
wife. Mrs. Page certainly embodied the traits most desirable in the
Ambassadress of a great Republic. A woman of cultivation, a tireless
reader, a close observer of people and events and a shrewd commentator
upon them, she also had an unobtrusive dignity, a penetrating sympathy,
and a capacity for human association, which, while more restrained and
more placid than that of her husband, made her a helpful companion for a
sorely burdened man. The American Embassy under Mr. and Mrs. Page was
not one of London's smart houses as that word is commonly understood in
this great capital. But No. 6 Grosvenor Square, in the spaciousness of
its rooms, the simple beauty of its furnishings, and especially in its
complete absence of ostentation, made it the worthy abiding place of an
American Ambassador. And the people who congregated there were precisely
the kind that appeal to the educated American. "I didn't know I was
getting into an assembly of immortals," exclaimed Mr. Hugh Wallace, when
he dropped in one Thursday afternoon for tea, and found himself
foregathered with Sir Edward Grey, Henry James, John Sargent, and other
men of the same type. It was this kind of person who most naturally
gravitated to the Page establishment, not the ultra-fashionable, the
merely rich, or the many titled. The formal functions which the positi