The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely and often whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happened to him.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream.”
He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the other Democratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen. He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreign mission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to a leading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked me about these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to see him get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeed all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque that the nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I gave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughed heartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two such appointments.
“Hewitt came over here,” he answered, “and then Dorsheimer. The father is the only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, he struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them and their friends.”
I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by, when suddenly he said: “I have been told over and over again by you and by others that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! What are you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?”
Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so.
When I had finished he said: “What are you doing about Winchester?”
“Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him and knows him well.”
Then he asked: “What do you want for Winchester?”
I answered: “Belgium or Switzerland.”