fire was kept burning for him, winter and summer alike; Page would put on his dressing gown, drop into a friendly chair, and sit there, doing nothing, reading nothing, saying nothing—­only thinking.  Sometimes he would stay for an hour; not infrequently he would remain till two, three, or four o’clock in the morning; occasions were not unknown when his almost motionless figure would be in this same place at daybreak.  He never slept through these nights, and he never even dozed; he was wide awake, and his mind was silently working upon the particular problem that was uppermost in his thoughts.  He never rose until he had solved it or at least until he had decided upon a course of action.  He would then get up abruptly, go to bed, and sleep like a child.  The one thing that made it possible for a man of his delicate frame, racked as it was by anxiety and over work, to keep steadily at his task, was the wonderful gift which he possessed of sleeping.

Page had thought out many problems in this way.  The tension caused by the sailing of the Dacia, in January, 1915, and the deftness with which the issue had been avoided by substituting a French for a British cruiser, has already been described.  Page discovered this solution on one of these all-night self-communings.  It was almost two o’clock in the morning that he rose, said to himself, “I’ve got it!” and then went contentedly to bed.  And during the anxious months that followed the Lusitania, the Arabic, and those other outrages which have now taken their place in history, he spent night after night turning the matter over in his mind.  But he found no way out of the humiliations presented by the policy of Washington.

“Here we are swung loose in time,” he wrote to his son Arthur, a few days after the first Lusitania note had been sent to Germany, “nobody knows the day or the week or the month or the year—­and we are caught on this island, with no chance of escape, while the vast slaughter goes on and seems just beginning, and the degradation of war goes on week by week; and we live in hope that the United States will come in, as the only chance to give us standing and influence when the reorganization of the world must begin. (Beware of betraying the word ’hope’!) It has all passed far beyond anybody’s power to describe.  I simply go on day by day into unknown experiences and emotions, seeing nothing before me very clearly and remembering only dimly what lies behind.  I can see only one proper thing:  that all the world should fall to and hunt this wild beast down.

“Two photographs of little Mollie[1] on my mantelpiece recall persons and scenes and hopes unconnected with the war:  few other things can.  Bless the baby, she couldn’t guess what a sweet purpose she serves.”

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