As for the Maderistas, they don't understand anything, feel no obligation to us, and wonder why we don't do more. The active anti-Maderistas feel very bitter that in any revolt aimed against Madero they can't "use" the border. Nobody has any political love for us. We loom up as uncertain in our mode of action, but powerful as arbiters of destinies. I have not been watching as carefully as I might the great, threefold presidential race at home. It's a consoling thought that any one of them will make a good President and under any one of them the United States will pursue its vast and brilliant destiny. Methinks, however, as regards two of the candidates, that, after the White House, no other place can ever really seem like home. _September 4th._ Luncheon here to-day for the Gustavo Maderos. He came in with rather more energy and magnetism than usual, and kept things lively. He produced from his pocket and presented to the various assembled guests some small, gilded statues of St. Anthony, in little glass, bottle-like reliquaries. He said San Antonio was his patron saint, and quite frankly stated that he was superstitious. His wit is of the ready kind--readiness in all things is doubtless his greatest quality. He seems not only excited by his prosperity and prominence, but intoxicated by it all. There is no gainsaying the fact that he does give a magnetic hint of possibilities by that abounding energy and life, overflowing and communicative, if he only wouldn't give the effect of taking everything in sight for himself or his friends. He is continually enveloped in clouds of incense by the expectant who form his circle. There are questions, from time to time, of the seven hundred thousand pesos he got from the treasury for the expenses of the revolution, but, to do him justice, it appears there are national, as well as family reasons which make it inexpedient for him to fully explain. As he was smoking his cigar in the library after lunch he said to me, with an intellectual flash: "Señora, we Latin-Americans think of everything you think of, but we don't put our thoughts into action. I am different. When I decide on something I act immediately, which is why I ought to succeed." I thought there was a whole world in that remark. One of the difficulties here _is_ the turning of their very brilliant ideas into action at the psychological moment. Madame Gustavo M. is handsome in a rather more artificial style than the other dynastic consorts. She has done something to her hair. But all the Madero women have qualities of good looks, freshness, and amiability.