“You cried then, I remember. Men don’t cry.”
Strong men had wept enough tears to put the Potomac in flood these last years, Lincoln was thinking. “When will it end?” he said aloud, with a groan. John Hay, his faithful secretary, looked up quickly from his desk in the outer room.
“When we’ve killed all the Rebs, I reckon,” said Tad complacently. “But if we killed ’em all I’d have a lot of uncles killed, wouldn’t I? I had one killed at Chickamauga already, my uncle Helm.—He was a general,” he told John Hay.
“It’s happened in a good many families, Tad,” Hay said. “That’s because we’re all Americans.”
“Well, my mother was Southern to begin with,” declared Tad, “so I’m kind of half Southern but I got over it.”
“Southerners are good folks, son,” Lincoln admonished him. “Fine people most of them. Just mistaken, that’s all—just mistaken.”
“They fight good,” was Tad’s comment, as they went down the hall.
Abraham Lincoln always stepped carefully and quietly in this big house. He had never been at home in the White House. He always had a secret, haunting feeling of guilt as though he were a guest and a strange, uneasy, even an unworthy, guest. Mary, his wife, had no such inhibitions. She loved to sweep down the wide stairway, her widely flounced skirts moving elegantly over her hoops, her tight small bosom, her round white arms and her round white chin held proudly and complacently. All this was her due, her manner said, and her husband’s humility and trick of effacing himself occasionally irked and angered her.
She was writing a letter at a desk when they entered her sitting room. The intent creases in her brow softened as the boy ran to her.
“Look Mama—look at Papa’s new solid gold watch! He got it for the ’Mancipation Proclamation.”