Free The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Eleanor Roosevelt

I wished, and she was more than kind in entertaining at formal lunches and dinners for me.
    One thing I remember vividly. I had run over my allowance considerably and had many overdue bills, and finally Mr. Parish took me in hand and painstakingly showed me how to keep books. He would not allow me to ask my grandmother to pay these bills, but he made me pay them myself gradually over a period of time. This was probably my only lesson in handling money, and I have been eternally grateful for it.
    He was tall and thin and distinguished looking, with a mustache, and while rather formal in manner he was the kindest person I have ever known.
    That winter I began to work in the Junior League. It was in its early stages. Mary Harriman, afterwards Mrs. Charles Cary Rumsey, was the moving spirit. There was no clubhouse; we were just a group of girls anxious to do something helpful in the city in which we lived. When we joined we agreed to do certain pieces of work, and Jean Reid, daughter of Mrs. and Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and I undertook to take classes of youngsters in the Rivington Street Settlement House. Jean was to play the piano and I was to keep the children entertained by teaching calisthenics and fancy dancing.
    As I remember it, we arrived there as school came out in the afternoon and it was dark when we left. Jean often came and went in her carriage, but I took the elevated railway or the Fourth Avenue streetcar and walked across from the Bowery. The dirty streets, crowded with foreign-looking people, filled me with terror, and I often waited on a corner for a car, watching, with a great deal of trepidation, men come out of the saloons or shabby hotels nearby, but the children interested me enormously. I still remember the glow of pride that ran through me when one of the little girls said her father wanted me to come home with her, as he wanted to give me something because she enjoyed her classes so much. That invitation bolstered me up whenever I had any difficulty in disciplining my brood!
    Once I remember allowing my cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, at that time a senior at Harvard, to come down to meet me. All the little girls were tremendously interested.
    I think it must have been this same winter that I became interested in the Consumers League, of which Mrs. Maud Nathan was the president. Luckily, I went with an experienced, older woman to do some investigation of garment factories and department stores. It had never occurred to me that the girls might get tired standing behind counters all day long, or that no seats were provided for them if they had time to sit down and rest. I did not know what the sanitary requirements should be in the dress factories, either for air or for lavatory facilities. This was my introduction to anything of this kind and I imagine that by spring I was ready to drop all this good work and go up to the country and spend the summer in idleness and recreation!
    As I try to sum up my own development in the autumn of 1903 I think I was a curious mixture of extreme innocence and unworldliness with a great deal of knowledge of some of the less agreeable sides of life—which, however, did not seem to make me any more sophisticated or less innocent.
    It would be difficult for anyone in these days to have any idea of the formality with which girls of my generation were trained. I cannot believe that I was the only one brought up in this way, though I imagine that I was more strictly kept to the formalities than were many of my friends.
    It was understood that no girl was interested in a man or showed any liking for him until he had made all the advances. You knew a man very well before you wrote or received a letter from him, and those letters make me smile when I see some of the correspondence today. There were few men who would have dared to use my first name, and to have signed oneself in any other way than “very sincerely yours” would have been not only a breach of good manners but an admission