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We had considered starting a coöperative community for ourselves, and Adler and I devoted some time looking at various properties. Our intention was to have separate living quarters with a joint kindergarten and a joint kitchen, thereby avoiding duplication of menial labour. This would have enabled our wives to devote more of their time to community work. It was to be an urban Brook Farm. Already having big ideas about real estate, I suggested and investigated the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum property, now occupied by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine! It could then have been bought for about $3,000 a lot. Adler, however, considered it too inaccessible, as it could only be reached by the Eighth Avenue street car, and so the idea was abandoned.

As many of my close friends were not adherents of Professor Adler, and we wanted to share our intellectual developments and efforts, we organized the Emerson Society; and under the guidance of my brother Julius who had just received his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Leipzig, we not only read, but thoroughly studied, a number of Emerson’s essays. I was chagrined to find that not only the college-bred men of our group, but also many of the girls were much better English scholars than I, so I determined to secure lessons from the best authority on English at that time. Richard Grant White, the annotator of Shakespeare and the author of “Words and their Uses,” was universally recognized as such, but I was told by people whom I consulted that it was useless to communicate with him as he undoubtedly would feel himself above giving private lessons. Nevertheless I wrote him for an interview, stating my age, vocation, and desire, and he answered: