In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house, and supervised its economies.  Any one of her undertakings was sufficient for one woman, but she compassed them all.  No children had more careful direction than hers.  No husband had more devoted attendance and companionship.  No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler grace, or with greater perfection of detail.  When the great ones of the world came to visit America’s most picturesque literary figure she gave welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion.  Says Howells: 

She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen—­the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.

And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells declared:  “She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular intellectual power.  I never knew any one quite like her.”  Then he added:  “Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens—­her fineness, her delicate, her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be, the most outrageous creature that ever breathed.”

Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt:  Clemens’s violent methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover the wrong and to repair it only too fully.  Then, too, Howells may have meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens’s exquisite sense of decorum.

Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders.  I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of “Oh, Youth!”

He was continually doing such things as the “crippled colored uncle,”; partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little—­“shock” would be too strong a word.  And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of her gentle nature.  Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a group, he said: 

You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said:  “Indeed, I do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument —­none!”

Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant over some offense of his; perhaps he would say: