Four years later, and ten years after my first acquaintance with Chase, I went to call upon him at his hotel in New York, when I was lately returned from my consular post in Venice, and ventured to offer him my congratulations upon his accession to the chief-justiceship of the Supreme Court. He answered bluntly that it was not the sort of office he had aspired to, and intimated that it was a defeat of his real aspirations. He was not commonly a frank man, I believe, but perhaps he felt that he could be frank with the boy I must still have seemed even at twenty-eight, bringing the devotion he possibly over-imagined in me. Since then those words of his, which were the last I was to hear from him, have been of an increasing appeal with me; and if the Republicans had not had Lincoln I still think it was a pity they could not have had Chase. At the end, the Democrats would not have him.
VIII
Chase was of course our man for the 1860 nomination, and the political relations between him and our chief were close; but somehow I went more to other houses than to his, though I found myself apparently launched from it upon a social tide that bore me through all the doors of the amiable little city. I was often at the evening parties (we called them evening parties then) which his daughter gave, and one day the Governor himself, as we met in the street, invited me to luncheon with him. I duly went and passed the shining butler’s misgiving into the dining-room, where I found the family at table with no vacant place among them. The Governor had forgotten me! That was clear enough, but he was at once repentant, and I lunched with him, outwardly forgiving, but inwardly resolved that it should be the last time I would come at his informal bidding. I have since forgotten much more serious engagements myself; I have not gone to dinners where I have promised over my own signature to go; but at twenty-one men are proud, and I was prouder then than I can yet find any reason for having been.
In our capital at that day we had rather the social facts than the social forms. We were invited to parties ceremoniously enough, but we did not find it necessary to answer whether we would come or not. Our hostess remained in doubt of us till we came or did not come; at least that was the case with young men; we never inquired whether it was so with young girls or not. But sometimes when a certain youth wished to go with a certain maiden he found out as delicately as he could whether she was invited, and if she was he begged her to let him go with her, and arrived with her in one of the lumbering two-horse hacks which supplied our cab-service, and which I see still bulking in the far perspective of the State Street corner of the State House yard. If you had courage so high or purse so full you had sent the young lady a flower which she wore to the party, preferably a white camellia which the German florist, known to our young world only as Joe, grew very successfully, and allowed you to choose from the tree. Why preferably a camellia I could not say after this lapse of time; perhaps because its cold, odorless purity expressed the unimpassioned emotion which oftenest inspired the gift and its acceptance. It was very simple, very pastoral; I do not know when Columbus outgrew this custom, which of course it did long ago.
Bringing a young lady to a party necessarily meant nothing but that you enjoyed the pleasure of bringing her. Very likely she found her mother there when she came with you, unmindful, the one and the other, that there was such a thing as chaperonage in a more fastidious or censorious world. It seems to me, indeed, that parties at the Columbus houses were never wanting in the elders whom our American society of girls and boys used to be accused of ignoring. They superabounded at the legislative receptions, but even at the affairs which my sophistication early distinguished from those perfunctory hospitalities there were mature people enough, both married and unmarried, who, though they had felt no charge concerning their daughters or nieces, found it agreeable to remain till the young ladies were ready to be seen home by their self-chosen escorts. A youth who danced so reluctantly as I, was rather often thrown upon these charitable elders for his entertainment, and I cannot remember ever failing of it. People, and by people I do not mean women only, read a good deal in that idyllic Columbus, and it was my delight to talk with any one who would about the new books or the old. The old books were known mostly to that number of professional men—lawyers, doctors, divines, and scientists—which was disproportionately large in our capital; they were each cultivated in his own way, and in mine, too, or the better part of it, as I found. The young and the younger women
read the current fiction and poetry at least enough to be asked whether they had read this thing or that; and there was a group of young men with whom I could share my sometimes aggressive interest in our favorite authors. I put the scale purposely low; I think that I could truthfully say that there was then no American community west of the Alleghanies which surpassed ours in the taste for such things. At the same time I must confess that it would be easy for such an exclusively literary spirit as I was to deceive himself, and to think that he always found what he may have oftener brought.