I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens’s familiar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at the elevator’s mouth for all who went to see Gorky.  As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and jointly.  I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing to say of Gorky’s domestic affairs; for the public interest had now strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these.  But with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for.  I forget how long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it.  That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone off,” as the telegraphic phrase was.  The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue.  The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.

“How many?” he demanded.

“Five,” the butler faltered.

“Reporters?”

The butler feigned uncertainty.

“What would you do?” he asked me.

“I wouldn’t see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them.  How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough.  They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them.  Of course he was right and I wrong, and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy.  In America it is not the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives.  Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.

XXIV.

To the period of Clemens’s residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his efflorescence in white serge.  He was always rather aggressively indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat.  But he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock.  After his measure had once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service of the family from