Dear Gutzon, Heaven bless you. What a glorious time God had of it when He made you. A glorious thought that, seeing the Infinite Hand reach down and gather up the dust of the mighty and the great and mold it with terrific force into the hardest--and softest--soul I have ever known. Out of Milton and a speck of Angelo, and a grain of Napoleon, an atom from Paul and a flame from the Immortal Redeemer. It is a thought to play with. Such a strange, complex, unlimited person you are ... counting a line of vital importance, throwing away a fortune, soothing a crying baby, harboring an army, fighting for peace, loving a friend. You and Mary are destroyers of weak faith, and I love you both. “Missy’s” picture of him is the one that his friends knew best. He never felt that he or anybody else had been endowed at birth with superior talents, though he always felt that he had done well with what he had. His ability to be successful as an artist, he declared, was due to trained observation and hard work. As a matter of course, he never talked down to an individual or to an audience. Once a Texas friend of his, Ralph Bradford, remarked that he was going to a “little hick town” to give a speech and didn’t need to prepare for it. Gutzon disagreed with him. “You never know the brains of an audience by the size of the town,” he said. “How do you know you won’t be talking to some ‘king maker’ who’s just there waiting for a train?” So Bradford, who presently moved on to an important post in Washington, did so because he stopped to prepare what he had to say--and the ambient “king maker” was in the audience. “If there hadn’t been any ‘king maker,’” Gutzon commented afterward, “it would have been just the same; somebody, if it was only Bradford, would have known that the orator was doing a good job.” Among the sculptor’s oldest friends was the painter Martin Borgord, a man of Norwegian extraction whom he had known in California and France. Borgord received honors in Paris and late in life returned to California. He stopped to visit Gutzon in South Dakota. Through him Gutzon met another well-known painter, William Singer, and his wife, and visited them in Norway. Mrs. Singer bought two of his marbles for her museum in Hagerstown, Maryland. Another friend of the early Paris days was the Belgian sculptor Paul Nocquet, who came to New York to be near Gutzon and lost his life in a balloon ascension. After his death Gutzon collected his art works, had some of them cast in bronze and arranged an exhibition. The sale netted several thousand dollars for Nocquet’s mother and sisters in Belgium. Among the patrons of the show, whose names appeared in a handsome catalogue, were President Theodore Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, and the French and Belgian ambassadors to the United States.