The picture of mother and son in those early days is an altogether charming one.

Page's mother was only twenty-four when he was born; she retained her youth for many years after that event, and during his early childhood, in appearance and manner, she was little more than a girl.

When Walter was a small boy, he and his mother used to take long walks in the woods, sometimes spending the entire day, fishing along the brooks, hunting wild flowers, now and then pausing while the mother read pages of Dickens or of Scott.
These experiences Page never forgot.

Nearly all his letters to his mother--to whom, even in his busiest days in New York, he wrote constantly--have been accidentally destroyed, but a few scraps indicate the close spiritual bond that existed between the two.

Always he seemed to think of his mother as young.