Oh, these June days! Are they hot with you? Here they are heavenly.

When the windows are open, the sweet warm air blows up from the river

and across the White Lot, and we get a whiff of roses from the gardens

back of the President's house; and when I reach home at night, the

fragrance of the roses in our own garden meets me long before I can see

the house. We have wonderful roses this year, and the hundred-leaved

bush back of the bench by the fountain is like a rosy cloud. I made a

crown of them the other day, and put them on the head of the little

bronze boy, and I took a picture which I am sending. Somehow the boy

of the fountain has always seemed to me to be alive, and to have in him

some human quality, like a faun or a dryad.

Last night I sat very late in the garden, and I thought of what you

said to me that night when you tried to tell me about your life. Do

you remember what you said--that when I came into it, it seemed to you

that the garden bloomed? Well, I came across this the other day, in a

volume of Ruskin which father gave me, and which somehow I've never

cared to read--but now it seems quite wonderful: "You have heard it said that flowers flourish rightly only in the

garden of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be

true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your

flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; if you could bid

the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, 'Come

thou south wind and breathe upon my garden that the spices of it may

flow forth.' This you would think a great thing. And do you not think

it a greater thing that all this you can do for fairer flowers than

these--flowers that have eyes like yours and thoughts like yours, and

lives like yours; which, once saved, you save forever.

"Will you not go down among them--far among the moorlands and the

rocks--far in the darkness of the terrible streets; these feeble

florets are lying with all their fresh leaves torn and their stems

broken--will you never go down to them, not set them in order in their

little fragrant beds, nor fence them in their shuddering from the

fierce wind?"

There's a lot more of it--but perhaps you know it. I think I have

always done nice little churchly things, and charitable things, but I

haven't thought as much, perhaps, about my fellow man and woman as I

might. We come to things slowly here in Washington. We are

conservative, and we have no great industrial problems, no strikes and

unions and things like that. Grace says that there is plenty here to

reform, but the squalor doesn't stick right out before your eyes as it

does in some of the dreadful tenements in the bigger cities. So we

forget--and I have forgotten. Until your letter came about that boy in

the pines.




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