The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Eleanor Roosevelt Page B

placid, but by the time we reached home she was somewhat calmer.

Three     
    Home Again
    THAT SUMMER was a stormy one. One day Pussie was annoyed with me. She told me frankly that I probably would never have the beaux that the rest of the women in the family had had because I was the ugly duckling. At the same time she told me some of the painful and distressing facts about my father’s last years. The combination made me very unhappy, and Mrs. Henry Parish, Jr., with whom I was spending the summer in Northeast Harbor, had her hands full trying to console me. She tried hard to give me a good time but I knew no one and had no gift for getting on with the younger people in Northeast, where they lived a life totally different from the English school life that I was then completely absorbed in.
    I wanted to get back to England to school and more traveling in Europe. After much begging and insistence I was finally told I might go if I found someone to take me over.
    I went to New York, where Pussie and Maude helped me to get my first long, tailor-made suit. The skirt trailed on the ground and was oxford gray. I was enormously proud of it.
    I engaged a deaconess to take the trip to London with me and return by the next boat. As I look back on it, it was one of the funniest and craziest things I ever did, for my family never set eyes on her until they came to see me off on the steamer. She looked respectable enough and I am sure she was, but I might just as well have crossed alone, for we had a rough crossing, and I never saw her till the day we landed.
    In the little Cunard ships of those days (I think we were on the Umbria ), a rough crossing meant that the steamer chairs, if they were out at all, were lashed to the railing. There were racks on the table, and when you tried to walk you felt you were walking up a mountain or down one.
    I had learned something since my first trip, and in spite of continually feeling ill I always got on deck and sat for hours watching the horizon rise and fall, and ate most of my meals up there.
    My deaconess and I proceeded to London to a large caravanserai of a hotel. The next day I went to school, carefully handed over the return ticket and enough money for her hotel bill to my companion whom I had taken care of and had rarely seen. But she had served the purpose of giving my family the satisfaction of knowing I was well chaperoned.
    School was as interesting as ever. Mlle. Souvestre was glad to see me back, and I had the added interest of a young cousin at school that year. Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Robinson brought over their daughter, Corinne, and left her with Mlle. Souvestre. She was younger than I, very intelligent, and soon won her way to Mlle. Souvestre’s interest and respect. In athletics she was far better than I was, and established her place with the girls more quickly than I had done.
    Having Auntie Corinne and Uncle Douglas in London was a joy for me, as we were allowed an occasional weekend away and frequent Saturday afternoons if we had a relative near enough to take us out, and I know that I went up to London once or twice at least to see Auntie Corinne; later Auntie Bye was there, too.
    I was only sorry that I had to go home before the coronation of King Edward VII, as they were all staying in London, where Uncle Ted would join them to act as special ambassador from our government.
    During the Christmas holiday of the year 1902 Mlle. Souvestre took me to Rome. We went to a pension in one of the old palaces where the rooms were enormous, with high ceilings, and though we rejoiced in their beauty we nearly froze to death trying to warm ourselves over a little portable stove which had a few red coals glowing in its center.
    We visited the Forum many times. Mlle. Souvestre sat on a stone in the sun and talked of history and how the men of Rome had wandered here in their togas; pointed out the place where Julius Caesar may have been assassinated and made us live in ancient history.