LOST
IN WASHINGTON, EDITH GALT CAME INCREASINGLY TO OCCUPY President Wilson’s thoughts and imagination. Throughout April she was a regular dinner guest at the White House, although for the sake of propriety she and Wilson always dined with others present. At one point they discussed a book that Wilson particularly liked, called Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Wilson ordered her a copy from a bookseller, but in the meantime he sent over a copy from the Library of Congress. “I hope it will give you a little pleasure,” he wrote, on Wednesday, April 28. “I covet nothing more than to give you pleasure,—you have given me so much!”
He added, “If it rains this evening, would it be any fun for you to come around [and] have a little reading—and, if it does not rain, are you game for another ride?” By “ride,” he meant one of the drives that he so liked to take in the White House Pierce-Arrow.
She declined the invitation, gently, having promised to spend the evening with her mother, but thanked him for his personal note and told him how it helped “fill my goblet of happiness.” Her handwriting made a sharp contrast to Wilson’s. Where his leaned forward and proceeded in perfectly horizontal phalanxes on the page, hers leaned backward and veered and bunched, in a cross between block printing and cursive, with random curls here and there, as if she wrote all her letters in a carriage rolling over cobblestones. She thanked him for the way he had closed his note, “Your sincere and grateful friend, Woodrow Wilson.” It had been particularly welcome on that Wednesday evening, after a day of gloom caused by depression, to which she appeared prone. “Such a pledge of friendship,” she wrote, “blots out the shadows that have chased me today, and makes April Twenty Eighth a red letter day on my calendar.”
The newly ordered book arrived at the White House soon afterward, and on Friday, April 30, Wilson sent it along to Edith’s house near Dupont Circle, with a brief note. “It’s a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that, it makes me hope that I may be of some use to you, to lighten the days with whole-hearted sympathy and complete understanding. That will be a happiness indeed.” He also sent flowers.
In seeking to brighten her days, he brightened his own. Here in Edith, in the midst of world chaos, he found a purpose to which he could devote himself that took him, if only temporarily, out of his apprehension about the widening war and the fate of the larger world. She was, to him, “a heaven—haven—sanctuary.” More than this, her presence helped him clarify his thoughts about the nation’s trials. On their evening rides in the White House Pierce-Arrow, he spoke to her of the war and his concerns as he probably would have spoken to his late wife, Ellen, thereby helping him order his own thoughts. “From the first,” Edith wrote, “he knew he could rely on my prudence, and what he said went no further.”
Edith, meanwhile, had begun to look at her own life through a new lens. Wilson’s interest, and the dash and charm of the world into which he had brought her, had caused her own days to seem emptier and less worthy. Though her own education had been haphazard, she longed for life on a higher plane, for good talk about art, books, and the tectonic upheavals of world events. A friend of hers, Nathaniel Wilson, no relation to the president, once told her that he sensed she might one day influence great events—“perhaps the weal or woe of a country.” But she had to be open to it, he warned. “In order to fit yourself for this thing that I feel will come to you, you must work, read, study, think!”
Edith saw her drives with President Wilson as “life giving.” She felt an immediate bond. They traded recollections of the old South, the hard days that followed the Civil War. She had never met a man like Wilson—intensely bright, but also warm and solicitous of her feelings. It was all very unexpected.
What Edith did not yet appreciate was that Wilson was now a man in love, and as White House usher Ike Hoover observed, Wilson was “no mean man in love-making when once the germ has found its resting place.”