Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| Brooklyn, the while she gossips with them and tells all about the fine doings in Washington. I saw not long ago in a newspaper that some thoughtless woman who had demanded of Mrs. Roosevelt a gift for a church fair, and had received a handkerchief hemmed by herself, had sent it back with the message that something better was wanted. I hope this which I am writing here will come under her eye and make her sorry for what she did. At that very time the President’s wife, with six children whose bringing up she supervises herself, and with all the social burdens of the mistress of the White House upon her shoulders, was patiently cutting and sewing a half-dozen nightgowns for the little tortured limbs of her crippled friends, and doing it all herself for love’s sake. She had brought them with her from Oyster Bay and finished them in the White House, where, I suppose, the church-fair woman thought she was being amused to keep from perishing of ennui. |
| They recall in that sewing-circle the days of the war, when Mrs. Roosevelt, walking down from the hill every Thursday to their meeting, and never betraying by word or look the care |