The management of the White House is, of course, a larger task than many women are ever called upon to perform, and, incidentally, the same “white light that beats upon a throne” sheds its sometimes uncomfortable radiance upon the usually unprepared heads of America’s Chief Executive and his family. Accustomed as I had been for years to publicity, yet it came as a sort of shock to me that nearly everything I did, and especially my slightest innovation, had what the reporters call “news value.”

I have lived too much in other countries ever to underestimate the importance of outward form, yet I think I may claim a wholesome regard for and a constant acquiescence in the principles of democratic simplicity, though not the kind of “democratic simplicity” which is usually written in quotation marks.