Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-07-31

to decorate her tea ia BILE with signs, Please
do not feed the Children" or cope with
weekly bilious attacks, and it ended in rent
ing larger house with a back yard and a
playroom. And from one or the other of
these every Tuesday afternoon during the
season issue shrieks and squeals of Joy or
wrath, to which accompaniment the congress
sional wife does her duty in the drawing room
The cost of living in a private house in
Washington is what drives SO many wives of
Congressman to the discomfort of smaller
hotels. Here, to be sure, one may be OBJ
ivious to the servant problem, the machina-
tions of the beef trust, the coal combine, and
the Washington marketman, by deposting
a weekly check, thereby pressing the but
ton, and the hotel clerk does the rest.
But of course constituents who look their
Congressman up do not regard hotel life as
bar sinister on hospitality, and one Con-
CHEESEMAN'S wife tells me that in the spring
when the constituents fancy lightly turns to
thoughts of excursion rates their bill is often
augmented by fifty dollars week through
"mealtime visitors"
Also think what it means to woman who
has always had her own home, perhaps her
own veranda and her own garden, to live
Cooped into two rooms and bath, and the
rooms so indelibly stamped with the in
human barrennesS of transient use that even
family photographs can't make them cozy.
Think what it means for woman who has
always had the busy life of housewife and
mother out in the home town, to have sud-
den idleness thrust upon her in this tran
sition from the numerous demands of house
keeping, and perhaps church work, to life
of palling leisure in hotel or an apartment
with cafe service. All the perfunctory calls
she is expected to make cannot take up all
the time. She may take to bridge to putty
up her Washington life.
But the stories of the way slices of the
statesmen's salaries change from wristbag to
wristbag, and of the card devotee admitting
with charming candor that her willow plume
or her Clanking lorgnette chain are the out
ward and visible sign of her superior skill at
trumps, can never be traced to this circle,
if indeed they ever had any origin in Wash
ington events outside the imagination of
overzealous news searchers.
Mrs. Congressman at the Hotel
NOR is Mrs. Congressman in the hotels an
~ exponent of the charge so often pressed
against us as a nation of women without do
nestle instinct. They have had their homes,
many of them have been as absorbed in
kinder, kuchen kirchen" as any German
Hdusfrdu;; but the web of that life has been
shattered to cut free their husbands po-
itical career, and they 60 with them to
Washington, willing to live in any way that
will make the children's education possible,
and compromise with the ambitious and the
parsimonious, the radical and the moss
backed element in their district, and, above
all, make for the comfort of the man whose
welfare they foster with steam heat and
prayers.
They read some, and they know more of
the local politics of their home circuit than
of the national issues laundering at their
Washington windows. They are often
shrewd advisers. They are infinitely more
adequate helpmates to the American pol
itician than if they spoke in epigrams or
could make clever platform speech.
The children, who out in the home town
had always "Where's mother?" on their lips
as they flung down schoobooks in the lower
hall, are generally at college now and call her
with deep affection the "old lady," always
adding that they all had to take college
education to keep up with her.
There isn't one of these women who
doesn't give anxious thought to her hus-
bands reelection, not one to whom defeat
would not be terrible blow, and honestly,
not because of what Washington, with all
its glitter for the outsider, means to her, but