"What were you doing at West Point?"

In January 1902 Ima’s youngest brother, Tom, wrote to her in New York and asked, “What were you doing at West Point?”

What Ima was doing at the U.S. Military Academy is best described in her memoir:

Mrs. Greene, the owner [of Ima’s New York boarding school] was from Virginia. She was one of those impoverished remnants of the Old South Aristocracy. She was hardly fitted to discipline a school of girls. Any girl who was a belle or received such attention from young men ranked high in her esteem. She encouraged us to accept invitations from cadets at West Point. When we went to balls . . . our programs were already made out for us by the cadet escort. [Among the young men’s names Ima remembered on her dance cards were Douglas MacArthur and George C. Marshall.] We were invited up on Saturday nights. There was one hotel. Bitter cold did not deter us from making the train trip. We were always met and escorted to the hotel. As many as four or five girls from Mrs. Greene’s School went periodically to West Point. All the cadets looked handsome in their unusual grey blue uniforms with big brass buttons.

When some cadets said they were coming down to New York to celebrate Christmas with us, of course we visualized them escorting us to the theatre in their uniforms. They appeared in fatigue suits—to the girls’ dismay. Their glamour was gone.

West Point’s shine may have dimmed, but Ima sparkled: After she attended a Confederate Veterans’ Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, an admirer wrote to her that was “the undisputed Queen of that night. This is no ‘taffy’ but a fact.”

But New York was not all parties and dances:

I really was a hard student of music, in spite of some dissipation. A strong constitution made it possible for me to work and attend concert after concert, opera after opera, with theater thrown in, almost every night. . . .

While I enjoyed social life, it was mostly going to some theater, concert, or opera with my escorts—but always with chaperones.

       Mrs. Greene was careful of her girls’ reputations.