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declared again ponder their example and strange influence. They founded something called the Union of Democratic Control, and they constituted what we should call a brain trust round Ramsay MacDonald while he reversed the foreign policy of Great Britain and abandoned so large a part of its military and naval power. To familiarize the general public with their principles they had a magazine, and it was in this particular that Mr. Auerbach could help them—he defrayed a part of the expense of publishing it.
    As Mr. Auerbach’s seeing eye and strong right arm, I had the privilege of meeting these influential men. Their aristocracy and refinement of manner and general culture were astonishing to me. Certainly the several politicians whom I had encountered in the United States were not in a class with them. And they were far from the phlegmatic type of Britisher; they expressed their gratitude to Mr. Auerbach over and again, and indeed our impression was that they would have been glad of his company even if he had not entered into their plans for the peace of Europe.
    Perhaps I have not given enough emphasis to the fact that Mr. Auerbach was a very good companion; a really civilized, knowledgeable old man. It was extraordinary, given the narrow range of his life as a whole and the complacency that as a rule develops with the making of a fortune. For almost half a century his days had been spent in Wall Street, in intense concern with money matters. He once confided to me that in his waking hours, until the hateful war left him to his own devices, business had never been out of his mind for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time; even his beloved beautiful wife had not distracted him from it. Yet now in his old age he had some grasp of all the main features of culture as such, and a personal point of view about it all. A love and a knowledge of music had come to him from his family, and having begun to buy art, he had mastered the essential facts about that also. On his brief annual holidays abroad he had kept in touch with all sorts of Europeans, and he appreciated the best in England and France and Italy as well as in Germany. He had a host of appreciative friends in New York, though not much intimacy with them; and even those who kept a bitter memory of his lack of patriotism in 1917 admired the dignified way he bore the onus of it. He had an odd, superior, deceptively simple nature. To me he was almost a hero in spite of the fact that I was to some extent, you might say, his valet.
    From London we journeyed across to Paris. It was April; the French spring came early that year. It was my first trip to Paris, I was young, I had never loved a city before, of course I loved it. The famous festive style and modest proportions of its architecture surprised me as much as they pleased me; all so pale, with a rosy tinge early in the day and a blue tinge later. The beauty of Paris is too well known to write about, although naturally now it is being forgotten. The weather that week was enchanting; the sunshine rippled over everything and at the same time the moisture in the air veiled it. Those old-fashioned carpets of flowers were brought from the greenhouses and laid down amid the Tuileries and the rectangle of the Louvre and elsewhere—extremely neat patterns in the fragrant, soft cross-stitch of all the petals. The mild breezes in a few days wore them out, until the greenish and brownish warp appeared; then overnight those patterns would be gathered up and replaced with a fresh set.
    Every evening we dined in the Bois; at that age I was not a gourmet, but I liked dining with fragrances and to music. What I liked best was the hush of the streets at twilight, when suddenly you were aware of the voices of the Parisians, light soprano and tenor voices, tired but complacent about the day’s work, turning with their peculiar kind of gratitude to their sentiment, pleasure, and sleep. Parisians get sleepy somewhat as birds in dusky