Page read aloud one of his funny darky dialect stories. I read two of Mother’s poems.
The Loudons sang charmingly and Edith Newlands played beautifully, a feast for which the peerless Dutch coffee and cordial fortified us.
February 1, 1912. A letter from Mr. Roosevelt asking me to come to see him. I found him in the outer office of the Outlook. The place was filled with reporters and others waiting to see him. I caught a glimpse of T. R. talking with a fat blond-bearded German. I asked one of the clerks who he was; he said “an artist”, as if that were an answer. Finally T. R.’s secretary took in my card. T. R. came out and shook hands with me; his first words were:
“I could no more have come to lunch with you than I could have flown”; then told them to take me to his private office, a suite of three rooms all filled with men. I was shown into the outer room where there were the fewest. A gentleman of his own sort was reading a book of poems; I think it was one of the classics. T. R. had given me a copy of the Outlook published that day containing a long article of his on Woman Suffrage with many tributes to Mother. When he came in, I thanked him for the article.
“You know that neither my own mother nor my wife is in favor of suffrage,” he said; “I believe your mother more than any one else converted me to it.”
“To her it was not so much a question of right as of duty,” I reminded him.
“That is just what I am trying to teach them,” was his answer.
Then I cried out, “Come back to us, come back to us!”
“But Massachusetts doesn’t seem to want me back,” he protested; “or, at least, the Back Bay does not.”
“I find that the people who love you best say, Wait till 1916, but the people who love the country best say, Now, now, now!” I said.