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When Florida’s winter season came to an end, Rose had to return to Holland Patent, and Evangeline continued her world travels. The separation cut both women. Rose, sitting in the train’s parlor car in the “home stretch” of the trip to Holland Patent, ached with longing when she took pen in hand and wrote Eve.

“Oh, Eve, Eve, this love is life itself—or death. I love you, love you beyond belief—you are all the world to me. God bless you.”

When Rose arrived at the Weeds, she found things a little disorganized after all her months away, and she missed Eve terribly. That night she wrote her again, “You are mine, and I am yours, and we are one.” Rose said she dreamed of being embraced in her lover’s “enfolding arms.”

“I shall go to bed, my Eve, with your letters under my pillow. I wonder if I will feel alone. God bless thee and keep thee safe.”

The next day, Rose went to the country store to purchase a supply of ink and stationery and prepared to “attack” another round of letters. In a rush of longing for Eve, she reached back to ancient times for lovers who epitomized their own love: Evangeline was Cleopatra and Rose was Antony.

“Ah, my Cleopatra,” Rose wrote that day, promising to “crush those Antony-seeking lips.” The letter ended with this erotic possibility: “How much kissing can Cleopatra stand?”

Rose picked up a book of poems by Robert Browning that must have put her in an amorous mood as she looked forward to the arrival of the afternoon mail—and two letters from Eve. In them Rose read that Eve was wondering whether they would ever see each other again. Rose wrote back, assuring her that their future together was real.

“Yes, darling, I will be with you, surely, in the Autumn.” Until then, Rose said, she was prepared to drown herself in work—“while I wait.” They solidified plans to rendezvous in New York City. Rose knew she’d be expected to stay at her brother Grover’s townhouse, but she wrote that she could also lodge with Evangeline, if Evangeline so desired. She was teasing. Of course they’d stay together.

“I could spend most of the time at your hotel—in your room. Ah, how I love you, it paralyzes me—It makes me heavy with emotion.... I tremble at the thought of you—all my whole being leans out to you. . . . Ah, Eve, Eve . . . you are mine by every sign in Earth and Heaven—by every sign in soul and spirit and body.”

Rose gazed at Evangeline’s photograph and could not take her eyes away—“the look of it making me wild.”

In 1893, after Grover Cleveland was sworn in for his second term as president, Rose’s relationship with Evangeline cooled off. One reason may have been that Rose, as the sister of the incumbent president, had to be cautious. Any whiff of a scandal questioning Rose’s sexual orientation had to be avoided. None of the Clevelands wanted a replay of the whispered innuendos aimed at Rose when she lived in the White House as First Lady. Around the same time, Evangeline told Rose that she was thinking about settling down and getting married—to a man. The gentleman in question was Henry Benjamin Whipple, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, a celebrated churchman with a national reputation as a champion of Native American rights. The Sioux called him “Straight Tongue” because he was always honest with them. A widower with six children, he was also thirty-eight years older than Evangeline.

Naturally, Rose was conflicted. While she was on a visit with her brother at the White House, when night fell and he had gone out, Rose thought things through, and part of her understood Evangeline’s desire for conventionality. She put her thoughts down on stationery embossed Executive Mansion.

“I wish for your happiness and good,” Rose wrote. While appreciating everything she was going through (“I know you suffer”), she implored Evangeline not to “decide hastily.” But she also promised to “act gracefully” and would support anything that would “give you joy and peace. . . . I love you enough for anything.... That means to take myself out of your way—for a while at least.”

“God bless