His mother evidently did catch the force, anyway of his determination. So, having asked her to send him his ‘nose-pinchers'* - ‘because they are more becoming’ - and having suggested that she might care to let the Allentown Chronicle know of his visit to Woonsocket,9 which she did, he set off for Rhode Island.

(* Pince-nez.)

The occasion turned out to be all he could have hoped for. There was, he wrote his parents, such a crowd watching that ‘it took four policemen to keep the mob in subjection’. The luncheon was excellent, with salads and oysters ‘in every style’, words were inadequate to describe the pretty dresses; there were jewels and laces galore; and a butler in full livery gave each of the departing guests a piece of wedding-cake.10

As the months went by, Buchman took advantage of the joys of the great city, and peppered his parents with enthusiastic reports. ‘We saw the pew in St Peter's which George Washington occupied and not only saw it, but sat in the very place he was wont to sit... I bicycled all up Wissahickon Drive yesterday; the scenery is grand… Yesterday Bernard and I went to a cricket match at Manheim. I saw a real live Prince. He is called Prince Ranji and is a champion cricketer. You can read about him in the Sunday Press …. Dewey* will be in Philadelphia on Thursday. I advise you to come. I wouldn't miss the chance to see Dewey as he is one of the biggest men of the century.’11 He heard Mile Nerada, who ‘frequently’ sang before Queen Victoria, saw Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Robespierre and Bernhardt playing Ophelia.12 He loved the splendour of grand opera - one year, he complained, he hadn't seen a single one ‘and the season almost over’13 - and relished being invited to a private showing of new paintings at the local Academy to which ‘a great many Parisians have sent work over’.14 He also wrote a paper on ‘Art in Worship’ for the Melanchthon Society.’15

(* Commodore George Dewey, hero of the Spanish-American War.)

Beneath Buchman's relish for a fashionable social life lay the insecurity and touchiness of a young man who could easily be wounded. One of his fellow-students had evidently been spreading minor items of gossip about him in Allentown: to wit, that a professor had said he did not have sufficient will-power to do his work (a grave charge in the German community), that he blushed a great deal - and that this blushing was not unconnected with his interest in a young lady called Marie.

Buchman retorted with heat. No professor, he told his mother, had ever hinted that he was not doing good work. As for the suggestion of a romantic attachment, ‘where Marie comes in and the blushing I do not know. I know no one by name Marie in Mount Airy, except Mary Fry and she is every bit of thirty-five and perhaps older...About my blushing that is the worst rot.’16

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