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“Listen, son,” said his father. “You are always talking about being a soldier and a soldier learns first of all to eat what is put before him. I’m sure Mother has very excellent soup and it will be warming and welcome on this chilly night. I put wrong ideas in their heads,” he admitted, as 9they shepherded the children into the dining room. “A very foolish thing to do.”
“Now you set an example of hungrily eating your soup,” said Edith. “At least there is a pudding later.”
“Does it have burning brandy on it?” inquired Kermit who had been devouring pictures of the old-fashioned English Christmas lately.
“No burning brandy, just hard sauce, but I suspect the cook put a drop or two of wine in it.”
“Well,” approved Alice, “that will be a little exciting.”
“You need to go to school, young lady,” commented her father.
“A stuffy old place like that?” She sighed. “And Bamie’s house is just as bad. Now I know how it will be: ‘Remember your father is governor. Do him credit.’ Sometimes I wish you were a plain man, Father, like other girls’ fathers.”
“You wish no such thing! You bask in all the publicity! Anyway I am a plain man. You don’t see me wearing a top hat, do you? Or putting on airs?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted, “I wish you would dress up a little more and wear all your medals.”
“Let’s all be just nice plain people,” suggested her stepmother.
Albany, Edith decided, was not going to be an easy place to hold the children to democratic standards. The governor’s children might be expected not to turn somersaults on the lawn of the executive mansion, or sail kites off the roof. Here at Sagamore Hill the younger ones had had the freedom of the place, nothing was closed to them. Even in Roosevelt’s workshop under the roof, the door was always open and she had seen her husband often writing or dictating an important speech with Archie or Kermit crawling 10about his feet or pushing a toy train and shouting “choo choo choo!”
Important visitors were often left cooling their heels in the parlor while Roosevelt was out having a rough and tumble in the hay with the children or down at the dock teaching one of them how to dive. When he was with his children he was as young as they were, and though this made him more lovable it could be exasperating, too, and at times embarrassing. Like the time a maid had misinterpreted the mission of two delegations of visitors, leaving a group of important men to cool their heels on the front porch while she waited on some startled and bewildered clergy in the parlor.