when kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about “the damned human race.”  He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it sounded.  The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him.  When I first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with advancing years disabled him.  Then it would be like him to struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his promise back, and it would be like her to give it back.  His profanity was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked.  It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel really minded it much more than that Guardian.  Angel of his.  It probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.  Nothing came of his pose regarding “the damned human race” except his invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club.  This was confined to four persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their indifference.

In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human motive was not selfish.  We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish origin.  Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero’s courage in the field and the martyr’s at the stake.  Each he found springing from the unconscious love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice.  If we had any time left from this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or “reformed the lords,” as it might be called now.  He thought that would have been an incalculable blessing to the English people and the world.  Clemens was always beautifully and unfalteringly a republican.  None of his occasional misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy.  Yet he felt passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased as “the Majesty of England.”  He rolled