Edith was also worried about Roosevelt’s safety. He was no longer a young man, and he had driven his body too hard for too long. Worse, he had become secretive. She complained that Theodore had maintained a “sphinx-like silence” about his expedition into the Amazon. If he thought that his reticence might spare her worry, he was wrong. “I can but hope that the wild part of his trip is being more systematically arranged than is apparent,” she had written Kermit just a few weeks before they sailed.
