Meetings with King 



him which was the repeated effect of 

 all our meetings, and which I still 

 have from every portrait of him. 



Our first meeting was in the proof- 

 reader's room of the old University 

 Press at Cambridge, where one was 

 apt to meet all sorts of casual and 

 habitual literary celebrities. He was 

 then a young man well under the 

 thirties, whose blondness was affirmed 

 rather by his blithe blue eyes and 

 fresh tint than by the light hair which 

 was cropped close on the head where 

 it early grew sparser and sparser. 

 He was of a slightness which his fig- 

 ure did not afterwards keep, and he 

 was altogether of a very charmingly 

 boyish presence, heightened in effect 

 by his interest in explaining the pith 

 hat which he had by him on the desk 

 where he was reading the proofs of 

 one of his papers on Mountaineering 

 in the Sierra Nevada. The time was 

 the hot heart of the Cambridge sum- 

 136 



