ecity and innter terror. Only occasionally did she reveal the anguished inner self. About this time young Franklin Roosevelt, handsome and debonair, an upperclassman at Harvard, the apple of his mother's eye, entered Eleanor's life in earnest. He seemed to Eleanor an improbable suitor. In any case, Franklin's determined courship and Eleanors's hunger for a home and family and desire to experiecen everything that was the lot of women routed all doubts. She had been brought up to regard the marriage bed as a duty and burgen and may well have meant that at that time the element of sensuality was lacking on he side. All her relationships were characterized by care, solicitude, and helpfulnes. She destroyed his courship letters, perhaps because sh found too painful the contrast between his youthful avowals of "fear nothing and be faithful unto death" contained in a poem he sent her that she quoted and his strategims of escape from intimacy of later years. Eleanor, spirited andstrong-willed, concentrated on making her marriage a success. Friends remember those first years of her marriage as the period when Eleanor in dutiful attendance to her mother-in-law was wont to reply to the older woman, "Yes, Mama" or "No, Mama." Her submission to her mother-in-law paralleled her meekness to Franklin at that time. In her autobiography she writes that she was jealous beyond words of other women giving him pleasure. Beneath the subordination and surrender to her husband and mother-in-law, however, were an awareness of her own abilities and a fierce pride in her own family that led her to resent appraisals by her husbands's or, more perticularly, her mother-i...
