[CHAPTER X.]
AT THE CAPITOL.
"Alone she sat—alone! that worn-out word,
So idly spoken and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known,
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word—alone!"
—The New Timon.
"How changed since last her speaking eye
Glanced gladness round the glittering room;
Where high-born men were proud to wait,
And beauty watched to imitate."
—Byron.
It was a crisp, cold, sunny morning toward the last of January, and all the world—at least, all the Washington world—was packed in the Senate galleries at the capitol, the occasion being the speech of one of the master minds of the Senate on a very important subject that was just then agitating the country North and South. But we have nothing to do with this brilliant speech. We will leave the gentlemen in the Reporters' Gallery to report it in irreproachable short-hand. For ourselves we are looking for friends of ours who have eddied thither with the crowd, and are occupying seats on the east side, where they command a good view of the Senate floor. There they are—Mrs. Conway in black silk, bonnet to match, gold eye-glasses, and the yellowest and costliest of real lace shading throat and wrists—an out-and-out aristocrat from the tip of her streaming ostrich plume to her small kid boot. Near her sits Lulu Clendenon, the brilliant center of many admiring eyes. The little Norfolk beauty has become a noted belle under the chaperonage of Mrs. Conway, and to-day she looks rarely beautiful in her brown silk dress, with soft facings and trimmings of seal-brown velvet, her soft brown furs, and a sash of fringed scarlet silk at her throat, confining the soft lace frill. Her great velvet-brown eyes hold two restless stars, her round cheeks are dashed with fitful scarlet, all her nut-brown hair is arranged on the top of her head in a mass of lustrous braids, and one long heavy ringlet floats over her sloping shoulder. The daintiest little hat of seal-brown velvet, with the scarlet wing of a bird fluttering one side crowns the small head, whose stately poise is grace itself. Bruce Conway, languid, handsome, elegant, in attendance on the little beauty, is the envy of half the Washington fops.
They sit dutifully still and listen to the learned harangue from the Senator on the floor below, admire his tropes, follow his gestures, wonder how much longer he is going to continue, until Bruce, who has come there every day that week, and listened to "that sort of thing" till he wearies of it all, loses his interest in the subject, and allows his appreciative glance to wander over the galleries at the beaming faces of the "fair."
"Lots of pretty girls here," he whispers to Lulu.
"Yes," she murmurs back, then stifling a pretty yawn. "What a long speech this is! Don't you think so?" bending one ear to him and the other to the speaker.