But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious.  I was ushered into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn.  Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of other manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger.  No club in London could match this chamber.  It was, I believe, a sort of lounge for the students.  Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it; only a few—­there was no rush for the privilege.  And the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth.  They might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid portraits by John Sargent.

The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic.  The dining-hall seating a thousand simultaneously was another.  Here I witnessed the laying of dinner-tables by negroes.  I noted that the sudden sight of me instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of butter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret reality of table-laying is the same in two continents.  I saw not the dining of the thousand.  In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one hundred of the six thousand students.  They had mysteriously vanished from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them.  Possibly they were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites—­each containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone—­which I understood are allotted to them for lairs.  I left Harvard with a very clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its extraordinary luxury.

And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student actually carrying his own portmanteau—­and rather tugging at it.  I regretted this chance.  The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been contrary to etiquette.  That student should in propriety have been followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his portmanteau.

My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring, suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard.  I repeat that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion.  What it seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word that would break its trance.  The fault was, of course, wholly mine.  I find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife.  I heard some mighty talking upon occasion—­and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities, science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely make him historic.