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Elliott wrote his father, March 4, 1877. “I wish you could hear the dismal forebodings that the Democratic members of our party (I was the only Republican) have for the ‘Old Union’ we have had some glorious pitched battles, ‘you bet’!” There were also whist parties until three in the morning, and although he assured his familythat he neither smoked nor drank, “for wine we drink catawba and the General knows what a good bottle of that is like I can tell you.”
    The old trouble with his head seemed to be gone but all his attempts to follow an organized course of reading and study came to naught. “It strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here . . . altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying,” he confessed to his father. He was troubled, but not enough to resist the temptations of the “glorious” life at the fort.
    Soon after Elliott returned to New York in 1877, his father became ill with what was later diagnosed as intestinal cancer. For weeks Elliott scarcely left his father’s room. That winter, wrote Corinne, “Elliott gave unstintingly a devotion which was so tender that it was more like that of a woman and his young strength was poured out to help his father’s condition.” Elliott wrote in his diary of his father’s “cries for ether,” the mercy of “a chloroform sleep,” and new agonies on awakening until the final release of death on February 10, 1878, at the age of forty-six.
    The family was devastated, and the children vowed to lead lives that would reflect credit on their father’s name. “We have been very fortunate,” Theodore Jr. wrote Bamie after he returned to Harvard, “in having a father whom we can love and respect more than any other man in the world.”
    Eighty-nine years later, Theodore Sr.’s granddaughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, contrasting her own style and outlook with that of her cousin Eleanor, said that Eleanor “was a do-gooder. She got that from my grandfather. It took with Eleanor, but not with me. I never did those things. They bored me.”
    Legacies of approximately $125,000 came to each of the children at the death of their father, which gave them an annual income of about $8,000. Of the $125,000, half was given outright, half a trust for life. Each of the children would receive another $62,500 at the death of their mother. And thus their annual income would be about $14,000 if they held onto their capital.
    For Elliott, the most sensitive of the children, the death of his father was not only a terrible sorrow but a disaster. Without his father’s stern, demanding, but loving guidance he was lost. Although intelligent and eager to learn, he was discouraged by the realization that he was hopelessly outdistanced by his contemporaries. Restless, spoiled by admiration and success out West, he was not prepared to start at the bottom of some business and patiently work his way up. And then therewas the strong pull of the exciting world of society and sport, where he was a leader by the sheer force of his personality. His inheritance made it possible for him to live in this world.
    Theodore, whom Elliott visited frequently at Harvard, admired his younger brother’s social skills and his great popularity with the girls. Although his every instinct was combative and competitive, Theodore was so fond of his brother, he wrote an aunt, that he could “never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward Elliott” and “gloried” in his accomplishments. This did not stop him from keeping a sharp eye on who was the better man. “Nellie stayed up from town,” he wrote in his diary in 1879, “and so I spent the day with him: we rowed around Lloyd’s—15 miles, and virtually racing the whole way. As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best, he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling