I
"If we receive this Lady Mary Montgomery, we shall also have to receive
her dreadful husband."
"He is said to be quite charming."
"He is a Representative!"
"Of course they are all wild animals to you, but one or two have been
pointed out to me that looked quite like ordinary gentlemen--really."
"Possibly. But no person in official life has ever entered my house. I
do not feel inclined to break the rule merely because the wife of one
of the most objectionable class is an Englishwoman with a title. I
think it very inconsiderate of Lady Barnstaple to have given her a
letter to us."
"Lee, never having lived in Washington, doubtless fancies, like the
rest of the benighted world, that its officials are its aristocracy.
The Senate of the United States is regarded abroad as a sort of House
of Peers. One has to come and live in Washington to hear of the 'Old
Washingtonians,' the 'cave-dwellers,' as Sally calls us; I expected to
see a coat of blue mould on each of them when I returned."
"Really, Betty, I do not understand you this morning." Mrs. Madison
moved uneasily and took out her handkerchief. When her daughter's rich
Southern voice hardened itself to sarcasm, and her brilliant hazel eyes
expressed the brain in a state of cold analysis, Mrs. Madison braced
herself for a contest in which she inevitably must surrender with what
slow dignity she could command. Betty had called her Molly since she
was fourteen months old, and, sweet and gracious in small matters,
invariably pursued her own way when sufficiently roused by the strength
of a desire. Mrs. Madison, however, kept up the fiction of an authority
which she thought was due to herself and her ancestors. She continued
impatiently,--
"You have been standing before that fireplace for ten minutes with your
shoulders thrown back as if you were going to make a speech. It is not
a nice attitude for a girl at all, and I wish you would sit down. I
hope you don't think that because Sally Carter crosses her knees and
cultivates a brutal frankness of expression you must do the same now
that you have dropped all your friends of your own age and become
intimate with her. I suppose she is old enough to do as she chooses,
and she always was eccentric."
"She is only eight years older than I. You forget that I shall be
twenty-seven in three months."
"Well, that is no reason why you should stand before the fireplace like
a man. Do sit down."
"I'd rather stand here till I've said what is necessary--if you don't
mind. I am sorry to be obliged to say it, and I can assure you that I
have not made up my mind in a moment."
"What is it, for heaven's sake?"
Mrs. Madison drew a short breath and readjusted her cushions. In spite
of her wealth and exalted position she had known much trouble and
grief. Her first six children had died in their early youth. Her
husband, brilliant and charming, had possessed a set of affections too
restless and ardent to confine themselves within the domestic limits.
His wife had buried him with sorrow, but with a deep sigh of relief
that for the future she could mourn him without torment. He had
belonged to a collateral branch of a family of which her father had
been the heir; consequently the old Madison house in Washington was
hers, as well as a large fortune. Harold Madison had been free to spend
his own inheritance as he listed, and he had left but a fragment. Mrs.
Madison's nerves, never strong, had long since given way to trouble and
ill-health, and when her active strong-willed daughter entered her
twentieth year, she gladly permitted her to become the mistress of the
household and to think for both. Betty had been educated by private
tutors, then taken abroad for two years, to France, Germany, and Italy,
in order, as she subsequently observed, to make the foreign attache.
Feel more at ease when he proposed. Her winters thereafter until the
last two had been spent in Washington, where she had been a belle and
ranked as a beauty. In the fashionable set it was believed that every
attache, in the city had proposed to her, as well as a large proportion
of the old beaux and of the youths who pursue the business of Society.
Her summers she spent at her place in the Adirondacks, at Northern
watering-places, or in Europe; and the last two years had been passed,
with brief intervals of Paris and Vienna, in England, where she had
been presented with distinction and seen much of country life. She had
returned with her mother to Washington but a month ago, and since then
had spent most of her time in her room or on horseback, breaking all
her engagements after the first ten days. Mrs. Madison had awaited the
explanation with deep uneasiness. Did her daughter, despite the health
manifest in her splendid young figure, feel the first chill of some
mortal disease? She had not been her gay self for months, and although
her complexion was of that magnolia tint which never harbours colour,
it seemed to the anxious maternal eye, looking back to six young
graves, a shade whiter than it should. Or had she fallen in love with
an Englishman, and hesitated to speak, knowing her mother's love for
Washington and bare tolerance of the British Isles? She looked askance
at Betty, who stood tapping the front of her habit with her crop and
evidently waiting for her mother to express some interest. Mrs. Madison
closed her eyes. Betty therefore continued,--
"I see you are afraid I am going to marry an Oriental minister or
something. I hear that one is looking for an American with a million.
Well, I am going to do something you will think even worse. I am going
in for politics."
"You are going to do what?" Mrs. Madison's voice was nearly inaudible
between relief and horrified surprise, but her eyes flew open. "Do you
mean that you are going to vote?--or run for Congress?--but women don't
sit in Congress, do they?"
"Of course not. Do you know I think it quite shocking that we have
lived here in the very brain of the United States all our lives and
know less of politics than if we were Indians in Alaska? I was ashamed
of myself, I can assure you, when Lord Barnstaple asked me so many
questions the first time I visited Maundrell Abbey. He took for
granted, as I lived in Washington, I must be thoroughly well up in
politics, and I was obliged to tell him that although I had
occasionally been in the room with one or two Senators and Cabinet
Ministers, who happened to be in Society first and politics afterward,
I didn't know the others by name, had never put my foot in the White
House or the Capitol, and that no one I knew ever thought of talking
politics. He asked me what I had done with myself during all the
winters I had spent in Washington, and I told him that I had had the
usual girls'-good-time,--teas, theatre, Germans, dinners, luncheons,
calls, calls, calls! I was glad to add that I belonged to several
charities and had read a great deal; but that did not seem to interest
him. Well, I met a good many men like Lord Barnstaple, men who were in
public life. Some of them were dull enough, judged by the feminine
standard, but even they occasionally said something to remember, and
others were delightful. This is the whole point--I can't and won't go
back to what I left here two years ago. My day for platitudes and
pouring tea for men, who are contemptible enough to make Society their
profession, is over. I am going to know the real men of my country. It
is incredible that there are not men in that Senate as well worth
talking to as any I met in England. The other day I picked up a bound
copy of the Congressional Record in a book-shop. It was frantically
interesting."
"It must have been! But, my dear--of course I understand, darling, your
desire for a new intellectual occupation; you always were so
clever--but you can't, you really can't know these men. They are--they
are--politicians. We never have known politicians. They are dreadful
people, who have come from low origins and would probably call me
'marm.'"
"You are all wrong, Molly. I bought a copy of the Congressional
Directory a day or two ago, and have read the biography of every
Senator. Nine-tenths of them are educated men; if only a few attended
the big Universities, the rest went to the colleges of their State.
That is enough for an American of brains. And most of them are lawyers;
others served in the war, and several have distinguished records. They
cannot be boors, whether they have blue blood in them or not. I'm sick
of blue blood, anyway. Vienna was the deadliest place I ever visited.
What makes London interesting is its red streak of plebeianism;--well,
I repeat, I think it really dreadful that we should not know even by
name the men who make our laws, who are making history, who may be
called upon at any moment to decide our fate among nations. I feel a
silly little fool."
"I suppose you mean that I am one too. But it always has been my boast,
Betty, that I never have had a politician in my house. Your father knew
some, but he never brought them here; he knew the fastidious manner in
which I had been brought up; and although I am afraid he kept late
hours with a good many of them at Chamberlin's and other dreadful
places, he always spared me. I suppose this is heredity working out in
you."
"Possibly. But you will admit, will you not, that I am old enough to
choose my own life?"
"You always have done every single thing you wanted, so I don't see why
you talk like that. But if you are going to bring a lot of men to this
house who will spit on my carpets and use toothpicks, I beg you will
not ask me to receive with you." "Of course you will receive with me,
Molly dear--when I know anybody worth receiving. Unfortunately I am not
the wife of the President and cannot send out a royal summons. I am
hoping that Lady Mary Montgomery will help me. But my first step shall
be to pay a daily visit to the Senate Gallery."
"What!" Mrs. Madison's weary voice flew to its upper register. "I _do_
know something about politics--I remember now--the only women who go to
the Capitol are lobbyists--dreadful creatures who--who--do all sorts of
things. You can't go there; you'll be taken for one."
"We none of us are taken very long for what we are not. I shall take
Leontine with me, and those interested enough to notice me will soon
learn what I go for."
Mrs. Madison burst into tears. "You are your father all over again!
I've seen it developing for at least three years. At first you were
just a hard student, and then the loveliest young girl, only caring to
have a good time, and coquetting more bewitchingly than any girl I ever
saw. I don't see why you had to change."
"Time develops all of us, one way or another. I suppose you would like
me to be a charming girl flirting bewitchingly when I am forty-five. I
am finished with the meaningless things of life. I want to live now,
and I intend to."
"It will be wildly exciting--the Senate Gallery every day, and knowing
a lot of lank raw-boned Yankees with political beards." "I am not
expecting to fall in love with any of them. I merely discovered some
time since that I had a brain, and they happen to be the impulse that
possesses it. You always have prided yourself that I am intellectual,
and so I am in the flabby 'well-read' fashion. I feel as if my brain
had been a mausoleum for skeletons and mummies; it felt alive for the
first time when I began to read the newspapers in England. I want no
more memoirs and letters and biographies, nor even of the history that
is shut up in calf-skin. I want the life of to-day. I want to feel in
the midst of current history. All these men here in Washington must be
alive to their finger-tips. Sally Carter admires Senator North and
Senator Maxwell immensely."
"What does she say about politicians in general?" Mrs. Madison looked
almost distraught. "Of course the Norths and the Maxwells come of good
New England families--I never did look down on the North as much as
some of us did; after all, nearly three hundred years are very
respectable indeed--and if these two men had not been in politics I
should have been delighted to receive them. I met Senator North
once--at Bar Harbor, while you were with the Carters at Homburg--and
thought him charming; and I had some most interesting chats with his
wife, who is much the same sort of invalid that I am. But when I
establish a standard I am consistent enough to want to keep to it. I
asked you what Sally Carter says of the others."
"Oh, she admits that there may be others as _convenable_ as Senator
North and Senator Maxwell, and that there is no doubt about there being
many bright men in the Senate; but she 'does not care to know any more
people.' Being a good cave-dweller, she is true to her traditions."
"People will say you are _passee,_" exclaimed Mrs. Madison, hopefully.
"They will be sure to."
Her daughter laughed, showing teeth as brilliant as her eyes. Then she
snatched off her riding-hat and shook down her mane of warm brown hair.
Her black brows and lashes, like her eyes and mouth, were vivid, but
her hair and complexion were soft, without lustre, but very warm. She
looked like a flower set on so strongly sapped a stem that her fullness
would outlast many women's decline. She had inherited the beauty of her
father's branch of the family. Mrs. Madison was very small and thin;
but she carried herself erectly and her delicately cut face was little
wrinkled. Her eyes were blue, and her hair, which was always carefully
rolled, was as white as sea foam. Betty would not permit her to wear
black, but dressed her in delicate colours, and she looked somewhat
like an animated miniature. She dabbed impatiently at her tears.
"Everybody will cut you--if you go into that dreadful political set."
"I am on the verge of cutting everybody myself, so it doesn't matter.
Positively--I shall not accept an invitation of the old sort this
winter. The sooner they drop me the better."
Mrs. Madison wept bitterly. "You will become a notorious woman," she
sobbed. "People will talk terribly about you. They will say--all sorts
of things I have heard come back to me--these politicians make love to
every pretty woman they meet. They are so tired of their old frumps
from Oshkosh and Kalamazoo." "They do not all come from Oshkosh and
Kalamazoo. There are six New England States whose three centuries you
have just admitted lift them into the mists of antiquity. There are
fourteen Southern States, and I need make no defence--"
"Their gentlemen don't go into politics any more."
"You have admitted that Senator North and Senator Maxwell are
gentlemen. There is no reason why there should not be many more."
"Count de Bellairs told me that there was a spittoon at every desk in
the Senate and that he counted eight toothpicks in one hour."
"Well, I'll reform them. That will be my holy mission. As for spittoons
and toothpicks, they are conspicuous in every hotel in the United
States. They should be on our coat-of-arms, and the Great American
Novel will be called 'The Great American Toothpick.' Statesmen have cut
their teeth on it, and it has been their solace in the great crises of
the nation's history. As for spittoons, they were invented for our own
Southern aristocrats who loved tobacco then as now. They decorate our
Capitol as a mere matter of form. I don't pretend to hope that ninety
representative Americans are Beau Brummels, but there must be a
respectable minority of gentlemen--whether self-made or not I don't
care. I am going to make a deliberate attempt to know that minority,
and shall call on Lady Mary Montgomery this afternoon as the first
step. So you are resigned, are you not, Molly dear?"
"No, I am not! But what can I do? I have spoiled you, and you would be
just the same if I hadn't. You are more like the men of the family than
the women--they always would have their own way. Are they all married?"
she added anxiously.
"Do you mean the ninety Senators and the three hundred and fifty-six
Representatives? I am sure I do not know. Don't let that worry you. It
is my mind that is on the _qui vive_, not my heart."
"You'll hear some old fool make a Websterian speech full of periods and
rhetoric, and you'll straight-way imagine yourself in love with him.
Your head will be your worst enemy when you do fall in love."
"Webster is the greatest master of style this country has produced. I
should hate a man who used either 'periods' or rhetoric. I am the
concentrated essence of modernism and have no use for 'oratory' or
'eloquence.' Some of the little speeches in the Record are masterpieces
of brevity and pure English, particularly Senator North's."
"You _are_ modern. If we had a Clay, I could understand you--I am too
exhausted to discuss the matter further; you _must_ drop it for the
present. What will Jack Emory say?"
"I have never given him the least right to say anything."
"I almost wish you were safely married to him. He has not made a great
success of his life, but he is your equal and his manners are perfect.
I shall live in constant fear now of your marrying a horror with a
twang and a toothpick."
"I promise you I won't do that--and that I never will marry Jack Emory."