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never forgot this pleasure, nor the warm kindness of the giver.
One day Mr. Abel Lefranc, the French lecturer of the year at Harvard, came to lunch with her. He apologized for only being able to stay for the luncheon hour, owing to a press of engagements and work that had grown overpowering.
He stayed for two hours and a half after luncheon was over, and during all that time the flow of poignant, brilliant talk, a deux, held the third in the little company absorbed.
She was entirely at home in French, and the Frenchman talked over the problems of his country as if to a compatriot.
A few days afterwards a Baptist minister from Texas, a powerfully built and handsome man, came to wait on her. He also stayed two hours: and we heard his “Amen!”
and “Bless the Lord for that!”
and her gentler “Bless the Lord, indeed, my brother!”
as their voices, fervent and grave, mingled in talk.
She never tried to be interested in people.
She was interested, with every fibre of her being.
Little household doings: the economies and efforts of brave young people, she thrilled to them all. Indeed, all human facts roused in her the same absorbed and reverent interest.
These are Boston memories, but those of Oak Glen are no less tender and vivid.
There, too, the meals were festivals, the midday dinner being now the chief one, with its following hour on the piazza; “Grandmother” in her hooded chair, with her cross-stitch embroidery or “hooked” rug, daughters and grandchildren gathered round her. Horace and Xenophon
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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