Mr. Liveright told me afterwards that he admired my self-composure. Thank heavens if I can appear so, and not betray the interior terror that possesses me at the thought of public speaking! FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 1921. (_Harding’s Inauguration._) Mr. Galatly and Childe Hassam fetched me and motored me out to George Gray Barnard’s studio. It is situated high up above the Hudson River. I was keen to meet him because Epstein had talked to me so much and so enthusiastically about him. As Epstein never has a good word for a fellow sculptor his eulogy of Barnard made a great impression on me. It was Epstein who showed me photographs of the Barnard Lincoln and the St. Gaudens Lincoln at the time of the great controversy. I had not a moment’s hesitation in my own mind as to which was the finer work of art. But some one decided on the St. Gaudens for Westminster. A people who could accept Sir George Frampton’s memorial to Nurse Cavell could hardly be expected to select the greater of the two Lincolns! The morning was bright, cold, and sunny. We knocked at the door of a big building by the roadside, and Barnard himself came to the door. Middle-aged, clean-shaven, with a mass of upstanding, gray hair, he blinked at us in the sunlight (he has a slight cast in one eye), and asked if I would like to see the cloister before I saw the studio. It was too cold, he said, for him to come with us, but we would find someone there to show us over. As we walked up the road towards a pile of masonry with some ruins and some columns outside it, I asked about the cloister. It was explained to me that this was built of stones and fragments from France, Italy and Spain, which Barnard had collected. He had designed the cloister, and built some of it with his own hands. It represented, so they said, the soul of Barnard, and there some day he would be buried. In this case it seemed quite sensible that I should see the cloister first and the builder afterwards, if the one explained the other. We went to a door and rang an old bell, even outside in the porch there was a smell of incense. An old man opened for us. He wore a black, worn robe, a rope around his waist, and a skull cap. He looked like a monk, and his face was tanned and wrinkled, but when he spoke, it was American! Inside, the building was of old pink brick, with cloisters all around, of beautifully matched pairs of columns of different patterns. In the center was the stone tomb of a Crusader. Small carved fragments were let into the walls here and there. There were side chapels, and altars and Madonnas and Bambinos, and candle sticks and golden gates, and everything that there ought to be. One really felt oneself in some remote corner of Italy. Moreover, it was simple and beautiful, in perfect taste, and built, so one felt, by loving hands.