nce,
was at Clemens's house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made
of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he
said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous
sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already
perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of
that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept,
as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of
the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid
shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently
greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk.
He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes,
under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of
plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable
perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for
him, but he was not all there for you.

VIII.

I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
the thread of thought in my mind. "I wonder why we hate the past so,"
and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "It's so
damned humiliating," which is what any man would say of his past if he
were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens
was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could
lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be
contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He
could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What