Had his spirit been broken by his trials, had his intellectual power weakened under the load of his affliction, had his burning interest in affairs cooled to a point where he could have been content to turn his back upon life’s conflict, he might have found some happiness, or at least some measure of repose akin to that with which age consoles us for the loss of youth.  But his greatest misfortune was that all the active forces of his personality survived to the last in their full vigor, inflicting upon him the curse of an impatience which nothing could appease, of a discontent which knew no amelioration.

My first meeting with Mr. Pulitzer is indelibly fixed in my memory.  As we entered the dining-room the butler motioned to me to take a seat on Mr. Pulitzer’s right hand, and as I did so I glanced up and down the table to find myself in the presence of half-a-dozen gentlemen in evening dress, who bowed in a very friendly manner as Mr. Pulitzer said, with a broad sweep of his hand, “Gentlemen, this is Mr. Alleyne Ireland; you will be able to inform him later of my fads and crotchets; well, don’t be ungenerous with me, don’t paint the devil as black as he is.”

This was spoken in a tone of banter, and was cut short by a curious, prolonged chuckle, which differed from laughter in the feeling it produced in the hearer that the mirth did not spring from the open, obvious humor of the situation, but from some whimsical thought which was the more relished because its nature was concealed from us.  I felt that, instead of my host’s amusement having been produced by his peculiar introduction, he had made his eccentric address merely as an excuse to chuckle over some notion which had formed itself in his mind from material entirely foreign to his immediate surroundings.

I mention this because I found later that one of Mr. Pulitzer’s most embarrassing peculiarities was the sudden revelation from time to time of a mental state entirely at odds with the occupation of the moment.  In the middle of an account of a play, when I was doing my best to reproduce some scene from memory, with appropriate changes of voice to represent the different characters, Mr. Pulitzer would suddenly break in, “Did we ever get a reply to that letter about Laurier’s speech on reciprocity?  No?  Well, all right, go on, go on.”

Or it might be when I was reading from the daily papers an account of a murder or a railroad wreck that Mr. Pulitzer would break out into a peal of his peculiar chuckling laughter.  I would immediately stop reading, when he would pat me on the arm, and say, “Go on, boy, go on, don’t mind me.  I wasn’t laughing at you.  I was thinking of something else.  What was it?  Oh, a railroad wreck, well, don’t stop, go on reading.”

As soon as we were seated Mr. Pulitzer turned to me and began to question me about my reading.  Had I read any recent fiction?  No?  Well, what had I read within the past month?