the book Mr. Hopf juggled with once a month was a big one, while that for Personal Expenditure was relatively small. When I dined alone with him in the luxurious panelled room I realized that life had indeed changed for me. His house, too, was filled with beautiful things. He had rare taste. His brother Edgar, whose English career had not yet begun, stayed with him on his periodical visits from Frankfurt. There was music then, big dinner-parties too, to which I was sometimes invited. Social amenities were not always quite easy, for the position of a Jew in New York Society was delicate, but I never once knew James Speyer's taste or judgment at fault. His intelligence showed itself not only in finance; he was intelligent all over; imaginatively thoughtful for all connected with him, and his philanthropy sprang from a genuine desire to help the unfortunate.
For Jews I have always had a quick feeling of sympathy, of admiration. I adore their intelligence, subtlety, keen love of beauty, their understanding, their wisdom. In the best of them lies some intuitive grip of ancient values, some artistic discernment, that fascinates me. I found myself comparing Alfred Louis with James Speyer; their reaction, respectively, upon myself showed clearly again the standard of what, to me, was important: the one, alone among his unchangeable, imperishable "Eternities," unaware of comfort as of fame, unrecognized, unadvertised, lonely and derelict, yet equally as proud of his heritage as the other who, in a noisier market sought the less permanent splendours of success and worldly honour. One filled his modern palace with olden beauty fashioned by many men, the other had stocked his mind with a loveliness that money could not buy. One financed a gigantic railway enterprise, the other wrote the "Night Song." All the one said blessed and ornamented the mind, all the other said advised it. One parted with a poem as though he sold a pound of his own living flesh, the other was pleased, yet a trifle nervous, when Muldoon--thinking to help me in my job--wrote a panegyric of easy philanthropies in the
Brooklyn Eagle, to which his fierce activities had now been
