There was no evidence of
those qualities which I feared to find, and his attitude was
one of unfailing kindness, considerateness, and generosity.
In the many talks I had with him I was always struck by his
evident devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his
writings he was the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred
youth, and his heroes were young, clean-thinking college men,
heroic big-game hunters, war correspondents, and idealized men
about town, who always did the noble thing, disdaining the
unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that he was
modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the
favored types which his imagination had created for his
stories. In a certain sense he was living a life of make
believe, wherein he was the hero of the story, and in which he
was bound by his ideals always to act as he would have the
hero of his story act. It was a quality which only one could
have who had preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in
spite of the hardening processes of maturity.
His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not
only had the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a
situation, but also had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability
to describe them vividly. I don't know how many of those men
at Vera Cruz tried to describe the kaleidoscopic life of the
city during the American occupation, but I know that Davis's
story was far and away the most faithful and satisfying
picture.
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