Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.
“I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me—is sweet!” she wrote. “But, dear kindred spirit, can you not trust me and let me lead you from the thought that you have forfeited anything by your fearless honesty to the conviction that, with such frankness between us, there is nothing to fear—we will help and hearten each other.”
She added, “You have been honest with me, and, perhaps, I was too frank with you—but if so forgive me!”
Later that morning, with the sun up and the day under way, Edith and Helen Bones went for another walk in Rock Creek Park. They sat on some rocks to rest. Helen glared at Edith and said, “Cousin Woodrow looks really ill this morning.” Helen loved her cousin and was protective of him. She nicknamed him “Tiger,” not because of some lascivious bent, but because, as Edith later told the story, “he was so pathetic caged there in the White House, longing to come and go, as she did, that he reminded her of a splendid Bengal tiger she had once seen—never still, moving, restless, resentful of his bars that shut out the larger life God had made for him.” Now, in the park, Helen burst into tears. “Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life!” she said. “And now you are breaking his heart.”
In a strangely cinematic intervention, Dr. Grayson suddenly appeared from a nearby stand of trees, riding a horse—a large white horse no less. He asked Helen what had happened, and she quickly answered that she had tripped and fallen. “I don’t think he believed her,” Edith wrote, “but he pretended to and rode on.”
His arrival was a timely thing, she added, “for I was starting to feel like a criminal, and guilty of base ingratitude.” She tried to explain to Helen that she wasn’t being an “ogre”; rather, she simply could not “consent to something I did not feel.” She told Helen that she understood she was “playing with fire where [Wilson] was concerned, for his whole nature was intense and did not willingly wait; but that I must have time really to know my own heart.”
Edith’s rejection caused Wilson great sorrow and left him feeling almost disoriented as world events clamored for his attention. Even Britain had become a growing source of irritation. In its drive to halt the flow of war matériel to Germany, British warships had stopped American ships and seized American cargoes. Early in the war Wilson had grown concerned that Britain’s actions might so outrage the American public as to cause serious conflict between the two nations. Diplomacy eased tensions, for a time. But then on March 11, 1915, in response to Germany’s “war zone” declaration of the preceding month, the British government issued a new, and startling, “Order in Council” proclaiming its formal intent to stop every ship sailing to or from Germany, whether neutral or not, and to stop ships bound even for neutral ports, to determine whether their cargoes might ultimately end up in German hands. Britain also sharply increased the list of products it would henceforth view as contraband. The order outraged Wilson, who sent a formal protest in which he described Britain’s plan as “an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace.”
The note achieved nothing. Complaints poured in from American shippers whose cargoes had been detained or confiscated, although the State Department did succeed in securing the prompt release of an automobile shipped by an American socialite. For the British the stakes were simply too high to allow compromise. As Britain’s ambassador to America, Cecil Spring Rice, had written the previous fall, “In the life and death struggle in which we are now engaged it is essential to prevent war supplies reaching the German armies and factories.”