ABSTRACT
Floods of words have been devoted to explanations of the death of Woodrow Wilson's love for House. The explanations vary astonishingly. On the one hand, Mrs. Wilson is depicted as a sort of female demon, "the woman in purple," who destroyed a beautiful friendship; on the other hand, House is depicted as a Judas who conspired to cut the League of Nations out of the treaty of peace while Wilson was in America. Wilson's love for House, warm from its birth in 1911, was hottest in the six months which followed the death of his first wife. From August 1914 to January 1915 House was his chief love-object. In the period when Wilson believed that House had prepared the way of the Lord and made his paths straight, his love for the Colonel was intense. Although Wilson's intellectual dependence on House continued to be extraordinary throughout 1917 and 1918, two personal actions of the Colonel thoroughly displeased him.
