annesses,
generosities, and tastes: A Washington boarding house had the odor of a
boarding house the world over.

Col. Sellers was as unchanged as any one Philip saw whom he had known
elsewhere. Washington appeared to be the native element of this man.
His pretentions were equal to any he encountered there. He saw nothing
in its society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table
that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most
airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in
magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive
imagination.

"The country is getting along very well," he said to Philip, "but our
public men are too timid. What we want is more money. I've told
Boutwell so. Talk about basing the currency on gold; you might as well
base it on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything!
You've got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops?
We must have improvements. Grant's got the idea. We want a canal from
the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build it."

It was difficult to get the Colonel off from these large themes when he
was once started, but Philip brought the conversation round to Laura and
her reputation in the City.

"No," he said, "I haven't noticed much. We've been so busy about this
University. It will make Laura rich with the rest of us, and she has
done nearly as much as if she were a man. She has great talent, and will
make a big match. I see the foreign ministers and that sort after her.
Yes, there is talk, always will be about a pretty woman so much in public
as she is. Tough stories come to me, but I put'em away. 'Taint likely
one of Si Hawkins's children would do that--for she is the same as a
child of his. I told her, though, to go slow," added the Colonel, as if
that mysterious admonition from him would set everything right.

"Do you know anything about a Col. Selby?"

"Know all about him. Fine fellow. But he's got a wife; and I told him,
as a friend, he'd better sheer off from Laura. I reckon he thought
better of it and did."

But Philip was not long in learning the truth. Courted as Laura was by a
certain class and still admitted into society, that, nevertheless, buzzed
with disreputable stories about her, she had lost character with the best
people. Her intimacy with Selby was open gossip, and there were winks
and thrustings of the tongue in an