I see I have wandered away from the receptions and dinners and my attempt to tell in some sort of consecutive fashion what a social season at the White House consists of, but remembering the crowds I lived in for four years it seems to me that everybody must know just as much about these things as I do. I have to keep reminding myself that I am not writing altogether for people who live in Washington, but for the people in the far places who have never been to Washington, but who have just as much of a personal property right in the nation’s capital and just as much interest in the proper conduct of its affairs whether they be legislative, administrative, diplomatic, or merely social, as any President ever had.

Conclusion

Our second summer at Beverly began with a call from Mr. Roosevelt. When the ex-President returned to the United States, on the 18th of June, 1910, after an absence of a year and a half, Mr. Taft sent two members of his Cabinet, the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Agriculture, and his aide, Captain Butt, to New York to meet him and to extend to him a personal as well as an official welcome home. According to Captain Butt’s Official Diary: