SEATTLE—Last evening I looked out of my window just before I climbed into bed and everything was white with snow. Very lovely, if you were just looking at the scenery, but not very encouraging if you were planning to fly East the next day!

Today dawned gray and cloudy and the rain is falling. It might be a winter day in Washington, and if I could just stay here and sit by the fire and read and knit and talk I would ask nothing better.

Part of the joy of winter is the sense of protection that being closed into a warm living room gives one, and the closeness of family ties is intensified by the stormy weather out of doors.

Being here has been a great pleasure and I hate to leave, but if possible I must be home by Thursday to see something of my family in Washington. I wish so often I could be in two or even three places at once!

Now I am to start East, however, and how shall I go? By this time I think the heads of the various airlines and the various railroads must think my son-in-law has a strangely uncertain guest who cannot decide what she wants to do nor when she wants to do it! Several newspaper offices have called up to inquire when Mrs. Roosevelt is starting East and I am sure they think I am lying when I say that I haven't the vaguest idea!

I am fairly sure, now, however, that by the time this starts over the wires I will be getting on a train, hoping to be notified somewhere on the way that I can get out and get on a plane.

Before I left Washington a friend of mine, Mrs. Carl Vrooman, whose husband was assistant secretary of agriculture in Woodrow Wilson's administration, sent me a novel which she had published some years ago. It is a limited edition and has a most charming picture of Mrs. Vrooman with her mother, Mrs. Scott, as a frontespiece. Mrs. Scott must have been a rather delightful older woman. There is strength in her face, but with it all a quizzical expression. She seems to say, "This world is a funny world. Let's get what amusement we can out of it, even if we do have to seem serious about it."

The novel might be called a political novel, and it pictures very well the various strains under which a man must live in public life and the temptations that may come to him under different guises. "The High Road to Honor" may seem improbable to some people but no one who has watched many political battles will deny the possible truth of most of the incidents. Though we may not be able to duplicate these occurences exactly in our own experience, we can certainly remember many happenings of a similar nature. It is a readable book and I think many people will find it enlightening.