THE
"TRUTH"
279
and his essential ignorance to real character and considerable learn–
ing. In any event she gave him his greatest moments: a brief span
of personal happiness and a truly great offer of forgiveness. Lewis
is at his very best in his courtship of her; he had considerable and
real charm, and she brought it all out. Twice during the courtship
they disappear from the documents, just drop out of sight, together.
These must have been his moments of happiness.
When Lewis' last mistress married, Lewis wrote her and des–
cribed their relationship as "the one distinguished event in my life."
As usual, about anything concerning himself, he was wrong. The
"one distinguished event in his life" was when Dorothy Thompson
wrote
to
her wayward husband, now separated from her:
But the very basis of my relationship to you is that I cannot cherish
any grudge or feel even normal resentment against you that endures, or
that changes my feelings. "That is the way he is," is the only answer
I can find....
This from the woman who said that during their marriage when
he came to her in the night drunk and demanding he exuded
an odor-"she paused in the recollection as she sought for the
exact
analogy-that was like rotting weeds."
But he could not perceive the authentic greatness of her state–
ment, for he was, and always remained, incredibly naive. And
if
he
was Henry James's John Marcher, he was also Harold Frederic's
Theron Ware: to presume upon the feelings and relations of other
people; to invent, and act upon, a human situation that does not
exist; to be sort of messily virtuous because of an unrecognized sexual
frustration; to be told finally, those grimmest of admonitions, "Things
are not what you think," and "Mind your own business." Frances
Perkins, who like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Thompson (and like
Sister Soulsby in
'The Damnation),
saw what he needed, i.e., protection,
describes a Ware-esque experience of Lewis in his early days in
New York. On the Staten Island Ferry-at this period he was still
presumably virginal himself-he spotted some pretty young girls and
decided that he would set himself up as their "protector;" he hovered
around the girls, and when they got off the ferry took them by the arm
over to the elevated railway:
Then one of the girls turned and said to me, "What are you doing to
us? What have you got against us anyway?" Sinclair then tried to
explain to her the horrible danger she was running there. She looked
at
him
and said, "What are you doing? I have been on the turf since
