The Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy An American Novel, by Henry Adams

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Title: Democracy An American Novel

Author: Henry Adams

Posting Date: December 13, 2008 [EBook #2815]
Release Date: September, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DEMOCRACY AN AMERICAN NOVEL

By Henry Adams

First published anonymously, March 1880, and soon in various
unauthorized editions. It wasn't until the 1925 edition that Adams
was listed as author. Henry Adams remarked (ironically as usual),
"The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my
life."--it was very popular, as readers tried to guess who the author
was and who the characters really were. Chapters XII and XIII were
originally misnumbered.

Chapter I

FOR reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee
decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health,
but she said that the climate would do her good. In New York she had
troops of friends, but she suddenly became eager to see again the very
small number of those who lived on the Potomac. It was only to her
closest intimates that she honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured
by ennui. Since her husband's death, five years before, she had lost
her taste for New York society; she had felt no interest in the price
of stocks, and very little in the men who dealt in them; she had become
serious. What was it all worth, this wilderness of men and women as
monotonous as the brown stone houses they lived in? In her despair
she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the
original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened
that so much culture should lead to nothing--nothing.

After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very
literary transcendental commission-merchant, she could not see that her
time had been better employed than when in former days she had passed it
in flirting with a very agreeable young stock-broker; indeed, there
was an evident proof to the contrary, for the flirtation might lead to