After 17 Years

"A woman's name should appear in print but twice--when she is married and when she is buried," but certain exceptions, doubtless, may be pardoned in a President's wife, and few Presidents' wives have lived up to the above maxim better than the one who proposed it--Edith Carow Roosevelt.

Last week the good lady's name appeared thrice in print but she was not married, nor, happy to relate, was she buried. None the less she emerged momentarily, if not by her own seeking, from the voluntary obscurity in which she has enveloped herself since the death of her husband. On the one occasion she and her stepdaughter, Alice Longworth (with whom she had been staying at Washington), called on Mrs. Coolidge (vide supra); on the other, she was called upon at Sagamore Hill by half a hundred admirers of the late President who had journeyed to lay an evergreen wreath on the grave of him who had been dead just seven years.

So the 50 journeyers came to pay their respects to the dignified lady of 64, Theodore Roosevelt's second wife, mother of five of his six children, the same lady who in the first decade of the century, slender featured, fair skinned, a lover of out of doors and a delicate pianist, presided gracefully over the White House.

The names of many of the 50 pilgrims to her doors had a familiar ring, for they were names spoken in the White House a score of years ago, such names as Straus, Murray, Fish. But the number of missing names was a reminder of how completely times had changed. Gifford Pinchot, the young forester whom President Roosevelt supported so ardently in his struggle for conservation of forests, is now fighting other battles single-handedly in Pennsylvania. Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt's close friend, has but recently gone to his grave. Senator Beveridge is no longer Senator, but hopes to be so again. Many others have come and gone from the British embassy at Washington since Bryce was there. Herrick is now the veteran Ambassador to France, where another-- Henry White--was then. Frank W. Mondell, who clashed with Roosevelt, is no longer Chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, but is Director of the War Finance Corporation. Frank Kellogg is no longer one of Mr. Roosevelt's trust-busting lawyers. The young Congressman from Cincinnati, who came up to the White House and took away Roosevelt's elder daughter, is now Speaker of the House. And the great figures of the Senate--most of them have gone to their graves: Hanna, Penrose, Aidrich, Hale, Platt. How deeply the bitterness of some of Roosevelt's fights with them is buried. Cannon, retired far from the scene of legislative battles, remembers much, and Roosevelt's Cabinet-- how diverse have been their fates. One sits as Chief Justice; another, Elihu Root, is dean of U. S. statecraft; another, Truman Handy Newberry, has had most discomforting experiences with the Senate to which he aspired; two others, James R. Garfield and George Bruce Cortelyou have retired to private life. But John Hay, Charles J. Bonaparte, Paul Morton, are gone. Swiftly the new order becomes the old, and the old becomes a memory.

Edith Carow Roosevelt must have felt last week that she looked upon a strange world. For a third time her name appeared in print when she boarded the liner Porto Rico for a voyage and a vacation of three weeks in Yucatan and Central America.