RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
go out and see the Philippine Islands. They say they are so interesting!"
Poor man, most of his reputation, such as it then was, had been made in the Philippine service, but he replied to her: "That's right, I should go. And I'm going, too, just as soon as I can possibly get away."
He meant that. He had promised the Filipinos that he would return to open their first Assembly, and even then he had a fixed desire to lead a party of American Congressmen to the country whose affairs they were endeavouring to settle by long-distance legislation founded upon very mixed and, in some cases, greatly distorted, second-hand information. Mr. Taft became Secretary of War at the beginning of 1904, but I spent the remainder of the winter after our arrival in the United States in Santa Barbara and did not join him until May, when I met him at St. Louis, where he went to open the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
President Roosevelt was to have done this, but urgent affairs kept him in Washington, so the Secretary of War was asked to represent him and to make the speech which an- nounced to the world the inauguration of this great Fair. I remember the occasion especially because I had been so long out of touch with the kind of buoyant Americanism which made itself felt in St. Louis that I had almost lost my own identity with it, and I began then to think that it was really good to be back in my own country.
I knew fairly well what it would mean to settle down in Washington as the wife of a Cabinet officer because I had lived in Washington before. While I didn't expect to be and didn't expect anybody to consider me "just nobody" I knew that it would not be at all like entering upon the duties
and privileges of the wife of the Governor of the Philippine Islands. I thought what a curious and peculiarly American sort of promotion it was which carried with it such diminished advantages.
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