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.

Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps.  It enjoys today the fullest measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything, at this international crisis, in the possible development of “closer communities and finer intimacies” between America and Great Britain, between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his “shameless frequentation.”

There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the aspect and value of words.  Now and then in what here follows he speaks familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness, whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the insisting inquirer.

“It is very difficult,” he said, seeking to diminish the tension so often felt by a journalist, even at the moment of a highly appreciated occasion, “to break into graceful license after so long a life of decorum; therefore you must excuse me if my egotism doesn’t run very free or my complacency find quite the right turns.”

He had received me in the offices of the corps, businesslike rooms, modern for London, low-ceiled and sparely furnished.  It was not by any means the sort of setting in which as a reader of Henry James I had expected to run to earth the author of “The Golden Bowl,” but the place is, nevertheless, today, in the tension of war time, one of the few approaches to a social resort outside his Chelsea home where he can be counted on.  Even that delightful Old World retreat, Lamb House, Rye, now claims little of his time.

The interviewer spoke of the waterside Chelsea and Mr. James’s long knowledge of it, but, sitting not overmuch at his ease and laying a friendly hand on the shoulder of his tormentor, he spoke, instead, of motor ambulances, making the point, in the interest of clearness, that the American Ambulance Corps of Neuilly, though an organization with which Richard Norton’s corps is in the fullest sympathy, does not come within the scope of his remarks.