The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Eleanor Roosevelt Page A

watch from the beach.”
    Alas, we found that Mrs. Ward was away, but we spent a wonderful hour down on the beach watching the sky and sea, and though Mlle. Souvestre had a cold the next day, she did not regret her hasty decision and I had learned a valuable lesson. Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been theretofore.
    As I think back over my trips with Mlle. Souvestre, I realize she taught me how to enjoy traveling. She liked to be comfortable, she enjoyed good food, but she always tried to go where you would see the people of the country you were visiting, not your own compatriots.
    She always ate native dishes and drank native wines. She felt it was just as important to enjoy good Italian food as it was to enjoy Italian art, and it all served to make you a citizen of the world, at home wherever you might go, knowing what to see and what to enjoy. She used to impress on my mind the necessity for acquiring languages, primarily because of the enjoyment you missed in a country when you were both deaf and dumb.
    Mlle. Souvestre taught me also on these journeys that the way to make young people responsible is to throw real responsibility on them. She was an old lady and I was sixteen. The packing and unpacking for both of us was up to me, once we were on the road. I looked up trains, got the tickets, made all the detailed arrangements necessary for comfortable traveling. Though I was to lose some of my self-confidence and ability to look after myself in the early days of my marriage, it came back to me later more easily because of these trips with Mlle. Souvestre.
    In Florence, we settled down for a long visit. Spring is a lovely time in Florence and I thought it had more flavor of antiquity than any city I had ever seen. I was reading Dante laboriously and had plenty of imagination to draw upon as I walked about the city. Here again Mlle. Sou-vestre’s belief that Americans could be trusted made my trip unique. The morningafter our arrival she took out the Baedeker, opened it at the description of the Campanile, and said, “My dear, I should be exhausted if I walked with you, but the only way to know a city really is to walk its streets. Florence is worth it. Take your Baedeker and go and see it. Later we will discuss what you have seen.”
    So, sixteen years old, keener than I have probably ever been since and more alive to beauty, I sallied forth to see Florence alone. Innocence is its own protection. Mlle. Souvestre’s judgment was entirely vindicated. Perhaps she realized that I had not the beauty which appeals to foreign men and that I would be safe from their advances. In any case, everyone was most helpful. Even when I got lost in the narrow little streets and had to inquire my way I was always treated with the utmost respect and deference.
    From Florence we went to Milan and then to Paris, where again I did my sightseeing alone. One day I met the entire Thomas Newbold family in the Luxembourg, and they wrote home that I was unchaperoned in Paris!
    Back in school again for a time, and then in the early summer great excitement, for Pussie had come to Europe with the Mortimers, and she and I were to sail for home together.
    I stayed with her in lodgings in London two nights before we sailed, and had my first taste of an emotional crisis on her part. I was to know many similar ones in the years to come. She always had men who were in love with her, not always wisely but always deeply!
    At this particular moment she thought she was casting away her happiness forever because she was being separated from the gentleman of the moment. I stayed up anxiously most of the night listening to her sobs and protestations that she would never reach home, that she would jump overboard. Being young and romantic, I spent most of the trip home wondering when she would make the effort and watching her as closely as I could. We were on a slow Atlantic Transport Line boat and shared a cabin. Her moods were anything but