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