April 5 Wednesday – Sam lunched with William Dean Howells; They also met at 8 or 8:30 p.m. at the home of Mary Mapes Dodge for dinner. Also in the company, Rudyard Kipling and wife, and Mary Mapes Dodge, Mary’s son James M. Dodge and wife, and William Fayal Clarke (now editor of St. Nicholas Magazine) [Apr. 4 to Livy, Howells; MTHL 2: 652nn1; MTB 964; NB 33 TS 5].

At the Glenham Hotel, Sam wrote a short note accepting a dinner invitation for the following night .

I am coming to that dinner to-morrow evening — many thanks. To me it has the look of a conspiracy, & I have always hankered for a chance to conspire against something or somebody [MTP].

Sam described the company for this dinner in a letter Apr. 7 to Livy:

I dined with the Kiplings night before last [Apr. 5] — with Kipling himself, his wife, her sister and her mother. Certainly that is a pair of most striking and remarkable girls to look at, with a most indescribable sort of beauty. They fasten one’s eyes like a magnet — or a baby — or a woodfire in the twilighted room….They are manifestly fine people.

[Describing Mrs. Dodge’s home]…spacious and beautiful apartment in 58th Street. My, what a homelike home it is! Not one of those cheap and bald and tasteless and hideous and spirit-depressing European ‘homes,’ but an American home — and the Americans are the only race in the whole earth who have great and fine and dainty and perfect taste in the distribution of color and polish and richness and harmony in an interior; and it is just these things that make the divine home, the enchanted home. How poor and shabby and gawky and lubberly and shammy and stupid Europe is, when it comes to living!…Mrs. D. is on the 8th floor and overlooks all Central Park and a far-reaching weep of fallen constellations — that is acres of interlacing webs of gaslights and electrics.

I have been out all day mapping out an adventurous summer for Huck and Tom and Jim. As a result I have two closely written pages of notes, enough for the whole book. There will be two mysterious murders in the first chapter. The book will be devoted to finding out who committed them. Tomorrow I shall go right at it. Be jolly, be cheerful, Dear heart!