I remember interesting gatherings at George Bancroft’s house on H Street. Uncle Sam had been a scholar at Round Hill School, kept by Doctor Coggeshall and Mr. Bancroft when they and the century were young. Mr. Bancroft seemed to me very old, though he still had a good many years of life before him. He was a small man with the nearsighted eyes of a scholar, a white beard, and rather an argumentative manner. I remember hearing him say that the first ten volumes of his History of the United States were published exactly forty years before the last volume. He was fond of young company, and I was more than once flattered by his talking with me when there were older and wiser people present; he knew what I am now learning, that the elixir of youth can only be administered by the young! There was more ceremony in Mrs. Bancroft’s ménage than was then common; once an ambassadress always an ambassadress. One did not forget that with her husband she had represented our country at the Courts of St. James and Potsdam. Mrs. Bancroft’s son, Alexander or “Sandy” Bliss, a friendly soul who went by the sobriquet of “Arabia Felix”, was very kind in keeping me supplied with partners at the Washington balls. Helen Gardner, who was with us on our Washington visit, was then in her first bloom, a slender brunette with a sparkling personality, a wit, a charm, an originality that made her a prominent figure wherever she was. I like to remember Helen’s hazel eyes at this time, before they had shed the many tears that must have been her portion, though I never saw a trace of one! Helen, the reserved, the high-spirited, was full of distances that sometimes made her seem beyond the reach of human sympathy. Her hazel eyes were covered by the smoothest eyelids I ever saw; when she looked down, they were like the petals of a white magnolia blossom. Her sense of humor was so subtle that it carried her lightly over disasters that would have overwhelmed another. She was a born princess, and though most of her life she lacked a court, she never lacked courtiers. She had the “fatal fascination” of the other Helen, though it was she who suffered from it, not her suitors. It never hurt any man to have loved Helen, but it interfered with much that she might have accomplished. It takes a deal of time and power to be fascinating, and yet who of her generation who remembers her bright willful presence, her whimsical talk, would have changed her an iota?