Full Text of the Excerpt

So, anyway, I began to . . . after I got settled and started to look around me, I went with my sister to a lot of things. You see, Hugo was a senator from Alabama then, and she took me to a lot of parties and to do the usual Washington things, you know. To Call on people and to meet those in the courts and Congress. I met Mrs. Roosevelt at a garden party. Well, now, Mrs. Roosevelt was not considered to be a beauty, as you know, but I thought that she was absolutely lovely. She was a tall slender woman and had brown hair and beautiful eyes. It was the lower part of her face, you know, that was ugly, the jaw and teeth. But she gave the impression of just such beauty and graciousness and charm and cordiality and I was just crazy about her. I thought that she was just perfectly wonderful. Well, I heard that Mrs. Roosevelt worked for the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. Then, the RFC ladies began to invite me to a lot of parties which I found extremely dull, because they would be bridge parties and awful Washington luncheons at some hotel that served that awful limp chicken with peas and oh . . . terrible! The whole thing was as boring as it could be. So, I asked Cliff, I said, "Look, if I have to go to these parties for you to get on in Washington, it is going to kill me because I just despise them. They are so boring and they only invite me because you are head of the banking section. They don't care anything about me." So, he said, "Well, if I can't succeed without your going to these parties, I don't think that I will succeed anyway, so . . . " Well, he told me that I didn't have to go to those horrible bridge parties anymore. So, I decided that I would volunteer for the women's division of the Democratic party, mostly because I was so crazy about Mrs. Roosevelt and I knew that she worked with them. I thought, "Oh, this will be lots of fun." So, I did.