“I dare say I strike you,” he went on, “as rather bewilderedly weighing my words; but I may perhaps explain my so doing very much as I the other day heard a more interesting fact explained.  A distinguished English naval expert happened to say to me that the comparative non-production of airships in this country indicated, in addition to other causes, a possible limitation of the British genius in that direction, and then on my asking him why that class of craft shouldn’t be within the compass of the greatest makers of sea-ships, replied, after brief reflection:  ’Because the airship is essentially a bad ship, and we English can’t make a bad ship well enough.’  Can you pardon,” Mr. James asked, “my making an application of this to the question of one’s amenability or plasticity to the interview?  The airship of the interview is for me a bad ship, and I can’t make a bad ship well enough.”

Catching Mr. James’s words as they came was not very difficult; but there was that in the manner of his speech that cannot be put on paper, the delicate difference between the word recalled and the word allowed to stand, the earnestness of the massive face and alert eye, tempered by the genial “comment of the body,” as R.L.  Stevenson has it.

Henry James does not look his seventy years.  He has a finely shaped head, and a face, at once strong and serene, which the painter and the sculptor may well have liked to interpret.  Indeed, in fine appreciation they have so wrought.  Derwent Wood’s admirable bust, purchased from last year’s Royal Academy, shown by the Chantrey Fund, will be permanently placed in the Tate Gallery, and those who fortunately know Sargent’s fine portrait, to be exhibited in the Sargent Room at the San Francisco Exhibition, will recall its having been slashed into last year by the militant suffragettes, though now happily restored to such effect that no trace of the outrage remains.

Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color of his kindly eyes.  Before taking in these physical facts one receives an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the most distinguished.  And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added:  “Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?”

“Dash my fame!” he impatiently replied.  “And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader.  All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.  Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are the notes required,