Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

During the next few weeks Bertha did not appear as well as usual. The changes Tredennis had seen in her became more marked. She lost color and roundness, and now and then was forced to show signs of fatigue which were not habitual with her. She made no alteration in her mode of life, however. When Tredennis called in the evening the parlor was always full, and she was always vivaciously occupied with her guests. Chief among her attractions was counted her pet pretence of being interested in politics. It was not a very serious pretence, but, being managed deftly and with a sense of its dramatic value, animated many an hour which might otherwise have been dull, in view of the social material which occasionally fell into her hands.

"What should I do," Tredennis heard her say once, "if I knew nothing of politics? There are times when they are my only salvation. What should I have done last night with the new member from Arkansas if I had not remembered that he was interested in the passage of the Currency Bill? He is an excellent, solid, sensible creature; we are frivolous, aimless beings compared with him. It is such men as he who do everything worth doing and being done, but he is purely a politician, and he has spent his life in a small provincial town, where he has been a most important person, and he cares as much for the doings of society and discussions of new novels and pictures as I do for the linseed-oil market—if there is a linseed-oil market. When I began to ask him modest questions about his bill, his face brightened at once, and he became a self-respecting and well-informed person,—at ease with himself and with me, and quite forgot his coat and his large boots, which had been slowly and painfully dawning upon him a few moments before when he contrasted them with Mr. Arbuthnot's silk attire. My very mistakes were a pleasure to him, as they gave him an opportunity to say several things very well worth remembering. He could not have told whether I was well or ill dressed, but he detected my flimsiness in argument in a moment, and gave me more information in half an hour than you scoffers could have given me in a week, and"—with much modesty of demeanor—"he mentioned to Senator Vaughan, in the course of the evening, that I was a most intelligent woman."

Arbuthnot and Richard burst into the laughter which was always her applause upon such occasions.

"You!" commented Arbuthnot. "You are Herodias' daughter, dancing for the head of John the Baptist. You are always dancing in a quiet and effective way for somebody's head. Whose would you like next? How does mine strike you?"

"Thank you," said Bertha. "Would you really give it to me if I danced for you in my ablest manner; and how do you think it would look on a charger?"

There was more than one hard-worked politician who, after a day of exciting debate or wearisome battling with windmills, found relief and entertainment in the pretty parlors. Some of those who came had known Bertha in her girlhood and were friends of her father, and with these it was the fashion to encourage her to political argument, and affect the deepest confidence in her statements, with a view to drawing forth all her resources. These resources were varied and numerous, and marked by a charming feminine daring and superiority to ordinary logic which were the delights of the senatorial mind.

"Why should I endeavor to convince you by being logical?" she said. "You have logic—at least we hope so—all day, and sometimes all night, in the Senate and the House, and even then you are not convinced of things. It is not logic which governs you, but a majority. And that is what one should aspire to, after all,—not to be in the right, but to be in the majority. And I am sure one's arguments are much more untrammelled and brilliant for being illogical. And if I convince you without logic, I win a victory worth having. It is like the triumph of an ugly woman who is called a beauty. If I am pretty and you say so, it is simply as if you said, 'white is white, blackness is dark'; but if I am not pretty, and am ingenious enough to persuade you that I am—there is a triumph to be proud of!"

It was nonsense, but it was often sparkling nonsense, whose very lightness was its charm, and the rooms were rarely ever so gay and full of laughter as when there was among the guests a sprinkling of men no longer young, who had come there to forget that they were jaded, or secretly anxious, or bitterly disappointed.

"It pleases me to dance before some of them," Bertha said to Arbuthnot. "I like to think I make them forget things for a little while. If I can do nothing greater and wiser, let me employ my one small accomplishment to the best advantage, and do my harmless best to be both graceful and agile. No one can persuade me that it can be a pleasant thing to engage in a hand-to-hand conflict from three to eight months in the year, and to sit day after day placidly endeavoring to confront men who differ with you on every point, and who count the fact among their virtues, and glory in it, and watch you and listen to you, with the single object of seizing an opportunity to prove in public that you are an imbecile or a falsifier, or a happy combination of both. When I reflect upon my own feelings," she added, with delightful naïveté, "when people are stupid and ill-mannered enough to differ with me, I am filled with the deepest sympathy for the entire political body. There is nothing so perfectly exasperating as to know people are differing with you, and I know there is nothing so wearing to the mind."

An exciting debate in the Senate was occupying public attention at this time, and to her other duties and entertainments she added that of following it in its course. She spent an hour or so at the Capitol every day, read the newspapers, and collected evidence and information with an unflagging industry which would have been worthy of admiration if it had been inspired by any serious intention. But she made no pretence of seriousness of intention. She returned home from such visits with derisive little arguments jotted down in her note-book and little sketches of senatorial profiles adorning its pages, and entertained a select audience with them in the evening,—an audience which not infrequently included the political dignitaries themselves. Her manner would have been a mystery to Tredennis if he had not remembered the professor's words of warning, and even with their memory in his mind he was often at a loss. There was a restless eagerness to be amused in all she did, and he felt that, after all, she was privately less successful in her efforts than she seemed. He was, at least, relieved to find that he had but little to do in the role assigned him. When Arbuthnot appeared again, he had entirely recovered his equilibrium, and was unemotional, self-possessed, occasionally flippant, plainly cherishing, at no time, any intention of regarding himself seriously. He did not sing his "Serenade" again, and, when he sang at all, committed himself to no outreaching warmth of feeling. He rarely spoke to Bertha alone, and the old tendency to airy derision of each other's weaknesses reasserted itself. Only once Tredennis heard him address her with any degree of seriousness, and this was in reference to her visits to the Senate. There had been an all-night session, and it had been her whim to take part in it to the extent of sitting up until after midnight, and she had returned home more tired than she was willing to confess. Arbuthnot—who, with Richard, Tredennis, and a newspaper friend, had been her companions in the dissipation—remonstrated with her after the little supper they had on their arrival at the house.