to the fireplace, so apparently wrapped up in his own thoughts that he
hardly greeted members of his own family. A wood fire was kept burning
for him, winter and summer alike; Page would put on his dressing gown,
drop into a friendly chair, and sit there, doing nothing, reading
nothing, saying nothing--only thinking. Sometimes he would stay for an
hour; not infrequently he would remain till two, three, or four o'clock
in the morning; occasions were not unknown when his almost motionless
figure would be in this same place at daybreak. He never slept through
these nights, and he never even dozed; he was wide awake, and his mind
was silently working upon the particular problem that was uppermost in
his thoughts. He never rose until he had solved it or at least until he
had decided upon a course of action. He would then get up abruptly, go
to bed, and sleep like a child. The one thing that made it possible for
a man of his delicate frame, racked as it was by anxiety and over work,
to keep steadily at his task, was the wonderful gift which he possessed
of sleeping.

Page had thought out many problems in this way. The tension caused by
the sailing of the _Dacia_, in January, 1915, and the deftness with
which the issue had been avoided by substituting a French for a British
cruiser, has already been described. Page discovered this solution on
one of these all-night self-communings. It was almost two o'clock in the
morning that he rose, said to himself, "I've got it!" and then went
contentedly to bed. And during the anxious months that followed the
_Lusitania_, the _Arabic_, and those other outrages which have now
taken their place in history, he spent night after night turning the
matter over in his mind. But he found no way out of the humiliations
presented by the policy of Washington.

"Here we are swung loose in time," he wrote to his son Arthur, a few