It was not long after our return to Washington from the first trip to Panama before arrangements were completed for the tour of the big Congressional party which Mr. Taft “personally conducted” to the Philippines and back, and which was destined to be slightly overshadowed as a Congressional party by the personality of Miss Alice Roosevelt who, under the chaperonage of Mr. Taft and Mrs. Newlands, made the trip just, as Kipling sings, “for to be’old and for to see.”

Knowing that I should have an opportunity to go again to the Far East in two years to be present at the inauguration of the first Philippine Assembly, I decided to remain behind this time. I did not think I would much enjoy this brief busy trip to the Orient with three children and decided that a quiet summer in England would be better for us all. So I took a cottage in Oxford for the summer and with my two younger children and one of my Cincinnati friends and her two children made various trips here and there and found myself most pleasantly entertained. It was an exceedingly quiet summer, unbroken save by the somewhat lurid accounts which we gathered from the British and European press of the progress of the Congressional party with Mr. Taft and Miss Alice Roosevelt in the East. One German paper went so far as to announce that Miss Roosevelt was undoubtedly engaged to be married to her father’s War Secretary.