The Peace Ship was a failure; but so were the under-cover official efforts the President and his sympathizers then steadily pushed. Things grew blacker. The day when we would go in seemed always nearer to me. In February of 1916 my depression was deepened by hearing Mr. Wilson himself admit it. My friends Secretary and Mrs. Daniels had been so gracious as to include me among their guests at the Cabinet dinner they were giving in honor of the President and the new Mrs. Wilson. We were all standing in the Daniels drawing room waiting their arrival. I was talking so interestedly with somebody that I had forgotten what it was all about, when I was conscious of a distinguished pair in the doorway. It took me an instant to remember what we were there for, and that this was the President and his lady. How they looked the part! At the dinner table the President was gay, telling stories, quoting limericks. Later, when it came my turn to talk to him and I told him how charming I had found Mrs. Wilson’s animation and lively wit, he rather eagerly fell to talking of her and, to my amazed delight, of the difficulties of courting a lady when each time he calls the house is surrounded by secret service men! Dropping his gaiety, he told me a little of the situation at the moment. “I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news that will mean that we are at war. Before tomorrow morning we may be at war. It is harder because the reports that come to us must be kept secret. Hasty action, indiscretion might plunge us into a dangerous situation when a little care would entirely change the face of things. My great duty is not to see red.” I carried away from that dinner a feeling of the tremendous difficulty, of the tremendous threat under which we lived, and of a man that had steeled himself to see us through. It strengthened my confidence in him. But of all this I could say nothing on my Chautauqua circuit, even when I began to realize that, more than anything else, these people were interested in the War. One of the most convincing proofs I received of this came from things I overheard at night. We ended our circuit with a siege of terrific heat—the kind of heat that made sleep impossible. The best room you could get was generally on the second-floor front. You pulled your bed to the window, and lay with your head practically out; but if you could not sleep you would certainly be entertained, for on the sidewalks below there would gather, around nine-thirty or ten, a little group of citizens who had come downtown after supper “to see a man.” Shopkeepers, laborers, traveling men, lawyers, and occasional preachers and hotel keepers would sit out talking war, preparedness, neutrality, Wilson, Hughes, for half the night.