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“It is possible that I may be able to give you the assistance you seek in your praiseworthy plan. I will see you with pleasure.”

The interview was successful. Mr. White undertook to give us lessons in the origin and growth of language, nor shall I ever forget the delight of that instruction. We used to meet in his apartment on Stuyvesant Square, the home of an artist and scholar, and his talks on the development of tongues from the Aryan to our modern English—his readings from the classics in that beautiful, cultivated voice of his with its perfect enunciation—are still fresh in my memory.

Two of my friends had joined me and when I was no longer contented to meet Josephine Sykes merely as a member of the Emerson Club, and therefore persuaded her to start a little club of our own, she joined the class.

Shortly after the death of Maurice Grau in 1902, my wife and I, calling on Mrs. Josephine Bonné, found the Conrieds there, and Conried told us that he was looking for fourteen men whom he could get to join him in subscribing the $150,000 required to secure the lease and management of the Metropolitan Opera House, and as I was one that Mrs. Bonné had suggested, he, with great earnestness, backed up by his fine dramatic talent, pleaded his cause. He told us of his histrionic training in the Burg Theatre at Vienna, and how his youthful ardour for the stage was permanently influenced by the high artistic ideals prevailing there.