Miranda purred.... The fire responded; a crisp, little musical crepitation; the flames licked the wood, the logs consumed themselves, in a cadenced song of happy Death and blessed Eternity. Punctured by this music silence entered, cozily, warmly descended upon the New England drawing-room.
PART SEVENTH
I
MISS ADGATE accepted the Bolingbrokes' invitation. She spent six weeks of gaiety in Washington. Indeed it was refreshing to live in the world again, to mix with people of the world; to have cogent reasons for dressing exquisitely every night for dinner, to be taken in to dinner by a facetious attaché, by, even, a complacent, redundant railway magnate; or, happy compromise, by a Member of the Cabinet, for it is well known that a Cabinet Minister may be amusing. Through the interchange of frivolities and banter one could rise, not to more important matters,—is anything much more important to the world than the light touch and a witty conversation? But Miss Adgate found refreshment in living again among people whose thoughts were sometimes occupied by questions impersonal, of more or less consequence to the world's history.
Someone possessed of a grain of humour has assured us that the “World is a good old Chum.”
Miss Adgate found the world at Washington a very good old chum during those six weeks. “In all but the aesthetic sense,” she reflected, “America is an interesting land to live in.” Plentiful wherever she went, tittle-tattle, supplemented by her own observations, helped her to form an idea of how this unwieldy bulk of a nation calling itself The United States of America was being rescued from fatuous chaos, a mass of political corruption and a superfluity of wealth, and lifted into an arrogant, resolute Power. But a Power whose outlook was as far removed from the simple hardy traditions of Puritan America as Earth is from Heaven.
An oligarchy of able men,—a handful,—chosen, directed, inspired by a man yet abler, more audacious than they,—these were moulding, had already changed the destiny, the policy of the United States.
Miss Adgate recognised the efforts of the Man at the Helm. He had followed a fixed idea, and the idea was the Greater Glory of his Country; he had secured with his henchmen indisputable prestige to the Nation, and, thanks to his star, his tenacity, his temerity, America,—feared to-day if not honoured, was powerful. But not alas approved of! “Damn approval!” (the worm will turn,—the watchword passed through the land). “We are ourselves.”