And yet, whenever his wife wisely prepared for a suitable time and made engagements for some sort of hospitality otherwise than by hap-hazard, it was perversely likely to be the case, when the appointed hour arrived, that James was "going on his nerves" and in no mood for "being entertaining." The most comradely of men, nothing galled him like _having to be_ sociable. The "hollow mockery of our social conventions" would then be described in furious and lurid speech. Luckily the guests were not yet there to hear him. But they did not always get away without catching a glimpse of his state of mind. On one such occasion,--an evening reception for his graduate class had been arranged,--Mrs. James encountered a young man in the hall whose expression was so perturbed that she asked him what had happened to him. "I've come in again," he replied, "to get my hat. I was trying to find my way to the dining-room when Mr. James swooped at me and said, 'Here, Smith, you want to get out of this _Hell_, don't you? I'll show you how. There!' And before I could answer, he'd popped me out through a back-door. But, really, I do not want to go!" The dinners of a club to which allusions will occur in this volume, (in letters to Henry L. Higginson, T. S. Perry, and John C. Gray) were occasions apart from all others; for James could go to them at the last moment, without any sense of responsibility and knowing that he would find congenial company and old friends. So he continued to go to these dinners, even after he had stopped accepting all invitations to dine. The Club (for it never had any name) had been started in 1870. James had been one of the original group who agreed to dine together once a month during the winter. Among the other early members had been his brother Henry, W. D. Howells, O. W. Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, John C. Gray, Henry Adams, T. S. Perry, John C. Ropes, A. G. Sedgwick, and F. Parkman. The more faithful diners, who constituted the nucleus of the Club during the later years, included Henry L. Higginson, Sturgis Bigelow, John C. Ropes, John T. Morse, Charles Grinnell, James Ford Rhodes, Moorfield Storey, James W. Crafts, and H. P. Walcott. * * * * *