Anderson to stay a week with her and, to my intense excitement, she added that she would like to have me accompany them. I was seventeen years old; I had never been to Washington and to me it was a very important event. I was not “out,” so I couldn’t spend my time in the White House as I would have liked, in going to brilliant parties and meeting all manner of charming people, but, fortunately for my peace of mind, the Hayes lived very quietly, so it was not so trying to have to devote myself to seeing the sights of the Capital like any other tourist.

I didn’t meet my husband until I was eighteen years old. We had been born and brought up in the same town; our fathers were warm friends and had practised law at the same bar for more than forty years; during that time our mothers had exchanged visits, and my sister Maria and Fanny Taft were schoolmates and close companions at Miss Nourse’s, but the Tafts lived at Mt. Auburn, a hill suburb of Cincinnati, and after Will finished Woodward High School he went for four years to Yale, so it is not at all surprising that we did not meet.