I arrived in Washington at six this morning. I don’t know what I’ve come for, I didn’t really plan it. Soukine[4] it was who suggested my coming, and clinched it by writing to Countess Gizycka to tell her so. This elicited a telegram from Countess Gizycka asking me to dine on Friday. Furthermore my letter to Sir Auckland Geddes produced a telegram asking me to lunch at the British Embassy on Thursday. Therefore, I came when I did. I have lunched and I have tea’d at the Embassy, I have walked round the town instead of dining. It is very warm and very lovely. The trees are in full leaf, there is a wind but it is a warm wind--Washington is a pleasant contrast to New York, it is large and airy and leisurely and dignified. It looks like a new town that is incomplete. As one drives outside, one does not get into slums and suburbs as with any other town, but suddenly one is in green pastures, it is like the boundaries of a village. I feel very lonely, Dick is in New Jersey. FRIDAY APRIL 22, 1921. Paul Hanna, a friend of Kenneth Durant’s, asked me to lunch, he and Mrs Hanna (everyone is married in America--however young) came to fetch me. We went to a restaurant near by where we found our party, among whom, with his wife, was Sinclair Lewis, the author of the much-discussed “Main Street.” The restaurant we lunched in was rather cleverly decorated, so that one had the impression of having a tent awning overhead, and being surrounded by Italian stone walls with vases, and a peacock was silhouetted against a sapphire blue sky. The proportions of the room, and the height of the roof lent themselves to this treatment. I was informed that it had been recently converted from a Baptist Chapel! How strange we Christians are! No oriental would thus desecrate his temple. The party amused themselves at my expense, telling American humor stories, which I couldn’t laugh at. I said I didn’t think the American paper LIFE was funny, they admitted they didn’t think so either, but that twenty out of a hundred jokes in PUNCH compensated for the other eighty. It was a funny party--I knew what train of thought Paul Hanna represented, but I wonder if the others did. After lunch most of us went off to the bookshop and I exchanged “Mayfair to Moscow” for “Main Street,” duly autographed.