President Roosevelt’s career as Civil Service Commissioner and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his efficiency and gallantry at San Juan Hill, which had brought him the governorship of New York, his well-known reluctance at being shelved into the vice presidency, all served to invest him with an unusual hold upon the interest of the public, apart from the magnetism of his own dynamic personality. Crowds such as the White House had never before witnessed, except on special occasions, made the President’s office their daily objective. His first public reception, New Year’s Day of 1902, drew an unprecedented multitude, 8,100 people passing in line to shake his hand and to be presented to the new First Lady and the Cabinet ladies. Mrs. Roosevelt had tabooed the handshaking for herself early in her husband’s official life at the gubernatorial mansion in New York. Although warned that this exhausting ordeal was expected of her, she managed its omission with the graceful tact that served her so well later for the seven and a half years of White House leadership. Instead of wearing a floral corsage she had simply carried a large bouquet, and no one ever thought she should lay it aside to shake hands. Five days after the reception, Mrs. Roosevelt introduced Miss Alice, just budding into womanhood, to society, at a most delightful reception and dance at which an elaborate buffet supper was served. Almost immediately she became the White House belle, with enough attention to turn her head completely. Every step was watched, and every act coloured and exaggerated, until simple girlish fun with her young companions was made to assume all sorts of ludicrous and absurd guises, for it must always be remembered that this slip of a girl was her father’s daughter, with his love of the outdoors and of all clean sport. To ride horseback hard and fast as their father and their brothers, to shoot straight, swim, drive, walk, and play every game to win, with all the concentrated energy and knowledge they possessed, had been instilled into the two Roosevelt daughters. Naturally, applied to the diversities of the social game, this sort of inherited dynamic force gave abundant food for discussion of the young dêbutante whose daily activities, daring and bizarre as some of them were, would have created but little attention had she not been a Roosevelt and in the White House.