The dinner in Mr. Dodge’s Fifth Avenue palace was a veritable banquet to me. Immediately opposite, across the avenue, was the other palace occupied by James Speyer. It was all rather bewildering, a new world with a vengeance. Years among the outcast of the city had not precisely polished my manners, nor could I feel at my ease thus suddenly among decent folk again. I remember being absurdly tongue-tied, shy and awkward, until M. de Chaillu, who was present, began to talk about books, stars, natural history, and other splendid things, and took me with him into some unimaginable seventh heaven. I had moments of terror too, but the strongest emotion I remember is the deep gratitude I felt towards Mr. Dodge. A further tiny detail clings as well, when I was invited for a week-end to the Dodge country house on the Hudson, and was bathing with the son. He was, like myself, six feet three inches, well built, but well covered too, his age perhaps close on forty. As we stood on the spring-board waiting for our second dive, he looked at me. “You certainly haven’t got a tummy,” he remarked with admiring envy. “I wish I were as thin!” And the casual words made a queer impression on me. I realized abruptly how little of certain real values such people knew ... how little these protected people ever _could_ know. I still see his admiring, good-humoured, kindly expression, as he said the empty words.... James Speyer, brother of Edgar, who later became a baronet and member of the Privy Council, was what we called in New York a “white man.” I hardly think I proved an ideal private secretary. His patience and kindness began at the first trial interview I had with him, when my shorthand--he dictated a newspaper financial paragraph full of unfamiliar terms--was not at its best, “not _very_ grand,” were the actual words he used. As for bookkeeping, I told him frankly that “figures were my idea of hell,” whereupon, after a moment’s puzzled stare, he laughed and said that keeping accounts need not be among my principal duties. A clerk from the office could come up and balance the books every month. The phrase about hell, the grave expression of my face, he told me long afterwards, touched his sense of humour. The huge book in which I kept his personal accounts proved, none the less, a daily nightmare, with its nine columns for different kinds of expenditure--Charities, Housekeeping, Presents, Loans, Personal, and the rest. It locked with a key. I spent hours over it. No total ever came out twice alike. Yet Mr. Hopf, the bright-eyed, diminutive German from the office, ran his tiny fingers up and down those columns like some twinkling insect, chatting with me while he added, and making the totals right in a few minutes. Max Hopf, with his slight, twisty body, looked like an agile figure of 3 himself. In his spare time, I felt sure, he played with figures. He was a juggler in my eyes.