President Roosevelt was to have done this, but urgent affairs kept him in Washington, so the Secretary of War was asked to represent him and to make the speech which announced to the world the inauguration of this great Fair. I remember the occasion especially because I had been so long out of touch with the kind of buoyant Americanism which made itself felt in St. Louis that I had almost lost my own identity with it, and I began then to think that it was really good to be back in my own country.

I knew fairly well what it would mean to settle down in Washington as the wife of a Cabinet officer because I had lived in Washington before. While I didn’t expect to be and didn’t expect anybody to consider me “just nobody” I knew that it would not be at all like entering upon the duties and privileges of the wife of the Governor of the Philippine Islands. I thought what a curious and peculiarly American sort of promotion it was which carried with it such diminished advantages.