MRS. WOODROW WILSON 139
candidly what I have already said to my readers. Naturally I felt a keen sense of disappointment; any one would. But I had never felt we could win and therefore was not shocked as they all seemed to be. And away back in my mind was the thought of personal freedom for my dear one, and for myself, which the relinquishment of this burden would bring.
I felt I must not linger to talk, but go and see if there were any way to assuage Ids natural feeling of being discredited. I found him already in bed, and he said: "Well, little girl, you were right in expecting we should lose the election. Frankly I did not, but we can now do some of the things we want to do." I sat on his bed, thinking he would want to talk; but in a few minutes his hand, which was holding mine, relaxed, and he was sleeping that quiet sleep which characterized him. There was never a sound of breathing, or a motion of the body; it was really rest; a suspended animation which, if he were ill, always alarmed me.
In the coming years when every nerve was tense with anxiety during the War, and the burdens resting on his shoulders enough to crush the vitality of a giant, there would come days when he was incapacitated by blinding headaches that no medicine could relieve. He would have to give up everything, and the only cure seemed to be sleep. We would make the room cool and dark, and when at last the merciful sleep would come, he would lie for hours in this way, apparently not even breathing. Many a time I have stolen in and leaned over him to listen—to see if he really were alive. Sometimes this sleep would last for five, six, or even eight hours. He would awaken refreshed and able at once to take up work and go on with renewed energy.
To go back to November yth. I could not sleep, feeling that all the things he had accomplished would be marred because they were only a part of the whole pattern of reform he had started. There was a tremendous record of accomplishment: the Federal Reserve Bank system; the tariff; the