RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
coming at one time. I was glad that she could go with my husband to Rome because she really could be a comfort and a help and not at all a responsibility.
Robert was not nearly as ill as we expected he would be and in a few weeks I was able to make definite plans for joining my husband. My sister, Mrs. Anderson, was going to Paris so I took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy her companionship on the voyage and sailed with her on the fourth of June, landing in France and going by train to Rome.
That the record of our ill-luck may be quite complete I must add that on the way across the Atlantic my son Charlie managed to pick up whooping-cough, and that by the time we reached Rome he had passed it on to Helen. Her first remark to her father was a plaintive query: "Papa, why is it we can never go anywhere without catching something?"
I devoutly hoped that we had caught everything there was to catch and that we might now venture to predict a period of peace.
I found my party very comfortably bestowed. They were occupying a whole floor at the Quirinal, the largest hotel then open in the city, and were keeping what appeared to me to be considerable "state." It looked as if they had the entire building to themselves, but that was because it was midsummer when few tourists visit Rome and when all Roman society is supposed to flock to its mountain homes and to northern resorts. However, midsummer though it was, a good many members of the "Black," or Vatican division of society, still lingered in the city and I found them evincing every desire to make our stay both pleasant and memorable. Before I arrived Mr. Taft had already "met, called upon, taken tea with and dined with Cardinals, Princes, counts, marquises, and distinguished Englishmen and Americans resident in Rome," to quote from one of his
238
