corps more strongly than in
permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the
interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force
of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without
interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may
think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help
myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young
gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but,
believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I
were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't
gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."

It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the
person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine
courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was
making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that
it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans,
mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along
their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.

Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the
American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. It enjoys today the fullest
measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his
benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who
has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything,
at this international crisis, in the possible development of "closer
communities and finer intimacies" between America and Great Britain,
between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his
"shameless frequentation."

There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are
authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take
an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United
States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about
style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the
aspect and value of words. Now and then in what here follows he speaks
familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any
means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness,
whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the
insisting inquirer.

"It is very difficult,