I saw Eleanor Roosevelt in a United Nations restaurant in, probably, 1951, when I was ten. The United Nations was then meeting in Lake Success, Long Island, while its headquarters were being built in New York City, and my mother took me there for the day because, I assume, she and my father thought it would be educational. At the time my parents were World Federalists and still hoped the U.N. might become a world government.

Mrs. Roosevelt entered the room after most of the tables were filled — a surprisingly tall, bulky woman in a patterned dress. Her back was stooped and she walked to her table with eyes lowered, looking neither right nor left, not to interrupt those of us already there.

As she walked, she smiled, constantly and mildly. The smile, I now think, was her way of handling her celebrity. She didn't look at people in the restaurant because we were presumably there to eat, not gape at public figures, but she smiled so that if we noticed her we would know her good will.

She was accompanied by a much younger and handsomer woman who I didn't recognize. She was a movie star, my mother whispered, and I looked again, harder, amazed not to know who she was. "That's Madeleine Carroll," my mother said — as if a movie star whose fame was in the thirties meant anything to me.

Once at table Mrs. Roosevelt raised her head and focused an intensified smile on Miss Carroll. Though there were windows nearby and a wet winter garden outside, Mrs. Roosevelt (at least while I was looking) didn't take her eyes off her luncheon companion. The two chatted quietly, and the rest of us in the room, who had been quiet before they entered, were even quieter now.

None of us went up to Mrs. Roosevelt. Finally we even stopped looking toward her table. I like to think we paid her a tribute she recognized and valued, one of the few tributes littleness can pay greatness: the tribute of treating her as though she were just one of us, a pleasant old woman having salad and a sandwich with a friend before her afternoon errands.

Bill welcomes hearing from his column's readers at wstott@mail.utexas.edu