"Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What a name! What a place!" On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by the combination of learning with _le sport_ which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party: Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being _the_ top authority in his profession with a kindness and _bonhomie_ which make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest love for _flânerie_ and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only _dig_!"--and saying with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. _Here_, Madame, beneath our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!" And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his _Eleanor_ letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, though the _Robert Elsmere_ letters, already published, run it hard. That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end. It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His passionate sympathy for England and France, his English naturalization--a _beau geste_ indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.