Note 52 — Chapter Thirty-one

I have never seen the like of Dora for her unfailing tact and ability to rise, or for that matter fall, to an occasion. Nor wonder they used to call her Madame Cherchez-la-Femme. Her memory for faces, for names, for circumstances, was of the most incalculable value to my brother, who had none of Roosevelt’s genius for that sort of thing. Time and time again, I have seen her win for herself and my brother, the deathless loyalty, for instance, of a lumberman from Nebraska, whom she could recall having met five years previously at the Sesquicentennial at Philadelphia, or recognize by name, the wife of someone they had probably shaken hands with from the platform of a moving train.

I was not present at the famous Franco-American banquet, where she averted what promised to be a fistic encounter between Ambassador Toussain and Leopold von Mark, by tilting a dish of raspberry ice into the lap of her canary-colored velvet gown, just as those two gentlemen were about to fly at each other’s throats.