Sometimes he would do a favoured manuscript the honour of taking it out to lunch in his coat-pocket, and an associate vividly recalls eggs, coffee, and pie in a near-by restaurant, while, in a voice that could be heard by the remotest lunchers, Page read passages which many of them were too startled to appreciate.

He was not given to overrating, but it was not in his nature to understate.

'I tell you,' said he, grumbling over some unfortunate proof-sheets from Manhattan, 'there isn't one man in New York who can write English--not from the Battery to Harlem Heights.' And if the faults were moral rather than literary, his disapproval grew in emphasis.
There is more than tradition in the tale of the Negro who, presuming on Page's deep interest in his race, brought to his desk a manuscript copied word for word from a published source.

Page recognized the deception, and seizing the rascal's collar with a firm editorial grip, rejected the poem, and ejected the poet, with an energy very invigorating to the ancient serenities of the office.
"Page was always effervescent with ideas.

Like an editor who would have made a good fisherman, he used to say that you had to cast a dozen times before you could get a strike.