One aspect of Page that remains fixed in the memory of his associates is his unwearied industry with the pen.  His official communications and his ordinary correspondence Page dictated; but his personal letters he wrote with his own hand.  He himself deplored the stenographer as a deterrent to good writing; the habit of dictating, he argued, led to wordiness and general looseness of thought.  Practically all the letters published in these volumes were therefore the painstaking work of Page’s own pen.  His handwriting was so beautiful and clear that, in his editorial days, the printers much preferred it as “copy” to typewritten matter.  This habit is especially surprising in view of the Ambassador’s enormous epistolary output.  It must be remembered that the letters included in the present book are only a selection from the vast number that he wrote during his five years in England; many of these letters fill twenty and thirty pages of script; the labour involved in turning them out; day after day, seems fairly astounding.  Yet with Page this was a labour of love.  All through his Ambassadorship he seemed hardly contented unless he had a pen in his hand.  As his secretaries would glance into his room, there they would see the Ambassador bending over his desk-writing, writing, eternally writing; sometimes he would call them in, and read what he had written, never hesitating to tear up the paper if their unfavourable criticisms seemed to him well taken.  The Ambassador kept a desk also in his bedroom, and here his most important correspondence was attended to.  Page’s all-night self-communings before his wood fire have already been described, and he had another nocturnal occupation that was similarly absorbing.  Many a night, after returning late from his office or from dinner, he would put on his dressing gown, sit at his bedroom desk, and start pouring forth his inmost thoughts in letters to the President, Colonel House, or some other correspondent.  His pen flew over the paper with the utmost rapidity and the Ambassador would sometimes keep at his writing until two or three o’clock in the morning.  There is a frequently expressed fear that letter writing is an art of the past; that the intervention of the stenographer has destroyed its spontaneity; yet it is evident that in Page the present generation has a letter writer of the old-fashioned kind, for he did all his writing with his own hand and under circumstances that would assure the utmost freshness and vividness to the result.

An occasional game of golf, which he played badly, a trip now and then to rural England—­these were Page’s only relaxations from his duties.  Though he was not especially fond of leaving his own house, he was always delighted when visitors came to him.  And the American Embassy, during the five years from 1913 to 1918, extended a hospitality which was fittingly democratic in its quality but which gradually drew within its doors all that was finest in the intellect and character of England.