There is just one incident in connection with the dinner party which Mr. Taft adds to his account of that day. As he sat down to dinner the ladies on either side of him leaned hastily forward to see what was written on his place card. “The Solicitor General”—that was all. Of course neither of them knew who the new Solicitor General was and it didn’t occur to him to enlighten them until it was too late to do it gracefully. So he allowed them to go on addressing him as “Mr. Solicitor General” while he, having them at an advantage, addressed them by the names which he had surreptitiously read on their place-cards. They were Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge and Mrs. John Hay.
When my husband had been in Washington two weeks I joined him and we took a small house on Dupont Circle where for two years we lived a life, sometimes amusing, sometimes quite exciting, but, on the whole, of quiet routine.
Washington society was much simpler then than it is now. Since that time a great many people of very large means have gone to Washington to live because of its unusual attractions and its innumerable advantages as a residential city. They have changed Washington, by their generous hospitality, into one of the most brilliant social centres in the world, where large dinner parties, balls, receptions, musicals and other entertainments are of daily and nightly occurrence throughout the season. The very character of the streets has changed. The small, red brick houses, closely grouped together and neighbouring, even in fashionable quarters, on negro shacks and cheap tenements, are being everywhere replaced by marble and granite residences of great beauty and luxury.
In 1890 Society in Washington still consisted, chiefly, of the “best families” of the old city, the Diplomatic Corps and the highest among the government officials. A dinner party of twelve was still considered large, and only a few people had weekly evenings At Home. There were occasional big receptions, but for nobody was society the mad rush that it is today. We ourselves lived very simply even for those simple days.
My daughter Helen was born in 1891, so for the last year in Washington I had two small babies to care for. In order that he might get a little much needed exercise Mr. Taft bought a horse and, fortunately, for us, he secured a most adaptable creature. He was supposed to be a riding horse, but he didn’t mind making himself generally useful. The Attorney General lent us a carriage which he was not then using—a surrey, I think it was called—and we hitched him to that; and the whole Taft family drove out of a Sunday afternoon to the Old Soldiers’ Home, which was the fashionable drive in those days, or up the aqueduct road to Cabin John’s bridge. My sister Maria who visited us used always to speak of our steed as “G’up,” a name suggested by Bobby’s interpretation of his father’s invocations to the good-natured and leisurely beast. Poor old “G’up”! I suppose with his “horse sense” he finally realised that he was leading such a double life as no respectable horse should lead; he gave up and died before we left Washington.
The Justices of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General, the men with whom Mr. Taft came most in contract, were, with their wives, very kind and attentive to us, including us in many of their delightful parties. Chief Justice Fuller was then the head of the court and I have the pleasantest memories of his and Mrs. Fuller’s hospitality. Justice Grey had married a Miss Matthews, a daughter of Mr. Justice Matthews. I had known Mrs. Grey in Cincinnati before her marriage.
During the course of my first weeks in Washington Mr. Taft had taken special pains to impress on me many times the necessity for my calling on Mrs. Grey without any delay. Much importance attached to the formality of first calls and I was the newest of newcomers who had to call on the wives of all my husband’s official superiors before they noticed me. Still, it was a full month before I had time to go to Mrs. Grey’s and I was considerably worried about it. But when, finally, I did go and had been most kindly received, I explained at once that the settling of myself and my small baby in a new house had, until then, kept me too busy for any calls. Mrs. Grey hastened to assure me that she understood my position perfectly and had not thought of blaming me.
“Indeed, my dear,” she said, “I knew that you had a small baby in the house and that you must be kept constantly occupied. As a matter of fact I should have waived ceremony and come myself to welcome you to Washington except for one thing which I could not very well overlook, and that is—that Mr. Taft has not yet called on Mr. Justice Grey.”
I think I have rarely seen anything more satisfactorily amusing than the expression on my husband’s face when I told him this.
But, in spite of the friendliness of the Justices and others, we really went out very little. On one occasion when my sister Maria had been visiting us for several weeks we went for a Sunday night supper to the house of a lady whom Maria had known very well in Cincinnati. She was living that winter in Washington and seemed to be rather well pleased with her social success. She talked loftily throughout supper, and during a good part of the evening, about the dinner parties she had attended and
