Upon one point, however, Mr. Gosse's conceptions were badly awry. He bore the Civil War in mind, and was convinced that its bitternesses were still an active force in our social life. One night at the Authors Club I was talking with him when my brother Edward came up to us and joined in the conversation. Mr. Gosse seemed surprised and even embarrassed. Presently he said:
"It's extremely gratifying, you know, but this is a surprise to me. I understand that you two gentlemen held opposite views during the war, and one of the things my mentors in England most strongly insisted upon was that I should never mention either of you in talking with the other. It is very gratifying to find that you are on terms with each other."
"On terms?" said Edward. "Why, Geordie and I have always been twins. I was born two years earlier than he was, but we've been twin brothers nevertheless, all our lives. You see, we were born almost exactly on the line between the North and the South, and one fell over to one side and the other to the other. But there was never anything but affection between us."
On another occasion Mr. Joe Harper gave a breakfast to Mr. Gosse at the University Club. There were seventy or eighty guests--too many for anything like intimate converse. To remedy this Mr. Harper asked about a dozen of us to remain after the function was over, gather around him at the head of the table--tell all the stories we could remember, and "give Mr. Gosse a real insight into our ways of thinking," he said.
Gordon McCabe and I were in the group, and Mr. Gosse, knowing perfectly what each of us had written, knew, of course, that McCabe and I had fought on the Southern side during the Civil War. If he had not known the fact in that way he must have discovered it from the stories we told of humorous happenings in the Confederate service. Yet here we were, on the most cordial terms with men who had been on the other side. It was all a bewildering mystery to Mr. Gosse, and presently he ventured to ask about it.
"Pardon me," he said to Mr. Harper, "it is all very gratifying, I'm sure, but I don't quite understand. I think Mr. Eggleston and Mr. McCabe were in active service on the Southern side during the war?"