Madeleine asked whether this was not dull work.
“Oh, dear, no! You see I know all about it, and told Mr. Carrington the story of every paper as we went on. It was quite amusing, I assure you.”
Mrs. Lee then boldly said she had got from Mr. Carrington an idea that Mrs.
Baker was a very skilful diplomatist.
“Diplomatist!” echoed the widow with her genial laugh; “Well! it was as much that as anything, but there's not many diplomatists' wives in this city ever did as much work as I used to do. Why, I knew half the members of Congress intimately, and all of them by sight. I knew where they came from and what they liked best. I could get round the greater part of them, sooner or later.”
Mrs. Lee asked what she did with all this knowledge. Mrs. Baker shook her pink-and-white countenance, and almost paralysed her opposite neighbour by a sort of Grande Duchesse wink:
“Oh, my dear! you are new here. If you had seen Washington in war-times and for a few years afterwards, you wouldn't ask that. We had more congressional business than all the other agents put together. Every one came to us then, to get his bill through, or his appropriation watched. We were hard at work all the time. You see, one can't keep the run of three hundred men without some trouble. My husband used to make lists of them in books with a history of each man and all he could learn about him, but I carried it all in my head.”
“Do you mean that you could get them all to vote as you pleased?” asked Madeleine.
“Well! we got our bills through,” replied Mrs. Baker.
“But how did you do it? did they take bribes?”