286   My Brother Theodore Roosevelt

The result was an award of damages which my brother refused to take and the most abject apologies on the part of the editor. The other suit, the Barnes suit, was entirely different, for in that transaction he was the man to make the accusation, and his opponent was a most brilliant and acute individual, and even although my brother's followers were confident of the accuracy of the statement he had made, for his statements were consistently accurate, still we felt that some apparent lack of proof, even though only apparent, might bring about an unfortunate result. Mr. John Bowers, one of the most able of his profession, was my brother's lawyer, and he later gave me many an amusing description of that extraordinary case. The counsel for the plaintiff were always averse to allowing my brother to testify, for the effect he produced upon the jury was immediate and startling. The opposing side would object to nearly everything he said, simply because anything he said induced a rapid and favorable response from the jury. In one part of the testimony Mr. Bowers told me that my brother had repeated a conversation between Mr. Barnes and himself, and had gone into accurate detail, which was listened to by the jury with intense and sympathetic excitement, whereupon the lawyer for the plaintiff objected to Mr. Roosevelt's statement as an "irrelevant monologue." Quick as a flash my brother turned upon the objector and said that "of course the gentleman in question might call it a monologue, but as Mr. Barnes had had as much to do with the conversation as himself, he, personally, would call it a dialogue." This retort brought down not only the house but the jury, and the unfortunate opposing lawyer withdrew his objection. That story and many others my brother recounted to us with humorous and sarcastic delight, shortly after the end of the trial, around a family teatable one Sunday evening at Sagamore Hill.

In September of that year, 1915, we suffered the loss of our beloved friend Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. Since the early days of 1884, she had shared the joys and sorrows of our lives. Beau

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tiful, brilliant, sympathetic, exquisite in her delicate individuality, in her intellectual inspiration, in her fine humor and sense of values-her beautiful head like a rare cameo, her wonderful gray-blue eyes looking out under dark, level brows, she remains one of the pictures most treasured in the memories of the Roosevelt family. My brother was always at his best with her, and I have rarely heard him talk in a broader and more comprehensive way of politics and literature than in the homelike library at 1765 Massachusetts Avenue, the house where Senator and Mrs. Lodge were always surrounded by an intimate circle of friends. By her tea-table, in the rocking-chair bought especially for him, Theodore Roosevelt would sit and rock when he snatched a happy half-hour after his ride with the senator in those old days when he was the President of the United States. Mrs. Lodge had the power of stimulating the conversation of others, as well as the gift of leading in conversation herself, and the best "talk" that I have ever heard was around her tea-table in Washington. Her sudden death was a great blow to my brother as it was to us all.

All through that year and through the year to come, although severely censured for his criticisms of the President's policies, my brother worked with arduous determination, shoulder to shoulder with General Leonard Wood and Augustus P. Gardner, to arouse the American people to the danger of non-preparedness, and to the shame of allowing the exhausted Allies to bear without America's help the brunt of the battle. Those men of vision realized, fully, that in a world aflame, no nation could possibly escape the danger of conflagration. Not only from that standpoint did the apostles of preparedness press forward, but from the love of democracy also. These courageous patriots wished to have their country share spontaneously from the beginning the effort for righteousness for which France, England, and Italy were giving the lives of the flower of their youth.

By pen, and even more by word of mouth, always at the expense of his energy, Theodore Roosevelt went up and down

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