race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I
first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to
struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity
was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It
probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
Nothing came of his pose regarding "the damned human race" except his
invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four
persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
indifference.

In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero's courage in the field and