James said, speaking with much consideration and
asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted, "my
devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in
permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the
interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force
of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without
interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may
think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help
myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young
gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but,
believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I
were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't
gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."
It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the
person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine
courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was
making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that
it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans,
mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along
their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.
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