anything delighted him more than a companionable exchange of ideas and impressions; he was seldom so busy that he would not push aside his papers for a chat; and he would talk with almost any one, on almost any subject—­his secretaries, his stenographers, his office boys, and any crank who succeeded in getting by the doorman—­for, in spite of his lively warnings against the breed, Page did really love cranks and took a collector’s joy in uncovering new types.  Page’s voice was normally quiet; though he had spent all his early life in the South, the characteristic Southern accents were ordinarily not observable; yet his intonation had a certain gentleness that was probably an inheritance of his Southern breeding.  Thus, when he first began talking, his words would ripple along quietly and rapidly; a characteristic pose was to sit calmly, with one knee thrown over the other, his hands folded; as his interest increased, however, he would get up, perhaps walk across the room, or stand before the fireplace, his hands behind his back; a large cigar, sometimes unlighted, at other times emitting huge clouds of smoke, would oscillate from one side of his mouth to the other; his talk would grow in earnestness, his voice grow louder, his words come faster and faster, until finally they would gush forth in a mighty torrent.

All Page’s personal traits are explained by that one characteristic which tempered all others, his sense of humour.  That Page was above all a serious-minded man his letters show; yet his spirits were constantly alert for the amusing, the grotesque, and the contradictory; like all men who are really serious and alive to the pathos of existence, he loved a hearty laugh, especially as he found it a relief from the gloom that filled his every waking moment in England.  Page himself regarded this ability to smile as an indispensable attribute to a well-rounded life.  “No man can be a gentleman,” he once declared, “who does not have a sense of humour.”  Only he who possessed this gift, Page believed, had an imaginative insight into the failings and the virtues of his brothers; only he could have a tolerant attitude toward the stupidities of his fellows, to say nothing of his own.  And humour with him assumed various shades; now it would flash in an epigram, or smile indulgently at a passing human weakness; now and then it would break out into genial mockery; occasionally it would manifest itself as sheer horse-play; and less frequently it would become sardonic or even savage.  It was in this latter spirit that he once described a trio of Washington statesmen, whose influence he abhorred as, “three minds that occupy a single vacuum.”  He once convulsed a Scottish audience by describing the national motto of Scotland—­and doing so with a broad burr in his voice that seemed almost to mark the speaker a native to the heath—­as “Liber-r-ty, fra-a-ternity and f-r-r-u-gality.”  The policy of his country occasioned many awkward moments which, thanks to his talent for amiable raillery,