RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
covered that, whatever its historic interest, I did not like it as a bed to sleep in. I soon replaced it with two smaller mahogany beds and I dispensed altogether with the draperies. There were canopies of the same gilded eagles over the windows, and the curtains suspended from them, as well as the upholstery of the sofa and chairs, were of the same blue and white brocade. Some of the furniture was colonial, some Victorian. The colonial furniture in the White House is very good and there is quite a lot of it in all the bedrooms, but many of the bureaus and wardrobes are of the scarcely-to-be-called beautiful style of the Victorian era. I secured for our room, later on, the beds, a dressing-table and some chairs, all colonial. These were about the only pieces of furniture I bought for the White House. I also substituted heavy chintz for the brocade draperies and upholstery, and did away with the canopy entirely, as they seemed to me to be too heavy for a sleeping room. The small room in the corner of our suite Mr. Taft used for a dressing-room.
The corresponding suite across the hall I gave to Helen, my daughter. It had been occupied by both of the Misses Roosevelt and before them, I believe, by Mrs. McKinley. It had been fitted up in pretty flowered chintz for Miss Ethel Roosevelt, after Miss Alice had married, and we left it unchanged.
I strolled down the hall, which contains only a large table and a few portraits of Presidents for which there is no wall space down stairs, and looked into the Library which is exactly in the center of the house on the south side. It is oval like the Blue Drawing Room beneath it and it is a little dark in the daytime, being shaded by the roof of the south portico. This was Mrs. Roosevelt's favourite room and it had been fitted most charmingly with many of her own belongings, but as they were now gone and my own had not yet been moved in, it looked rather bare. The
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