t there
might be in politics.

Her friends asked what kind of amusement she expected to find among
the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in Washington represented
constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York was a New
Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She replied that if
Washington society were so bad as this, she should have gained all she
wanted, for it would be a pleasure to return,--precisely the feeling she
longed for. In her own mind, however, she frowned on the idea of
seeking for men. What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash
of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole
continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled,
or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the
tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work.
What she wanted, was POWER.

Perhaps the force of the engine was a little confused in her mind with
that of the engineer, the power with the men who wielded it. Perhaps the
human interest of politics was after all what really attracted her, and,
however strongly she might deny it, the passion for exercising power,
for its own sake, might dazzle and mislead a woman who had exhausted all
the ordinary feminine resources. But why speculate about her motives?
The stage was before her, the curtain was rising, the actors were ready
to enter; she had only to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and
see how the play was acted and the stage effects were produced; how the
great tragedians mouthed, and the stage-manager swore.

Chapter II

ON the first of December, Mrs. Lee took the train for Washington, and
before five o'clock that evening she was entering her newly hired
house on Lafayette Square. She shrugged her shoulders with a mingled
expression of contempt and grief at the curious barbarism of the
curtains and the wall-papers, and her next two days were occupied with
a life-and-death struggle to get the mastery over her surroundings. In
this awful contest the interior of the doomed house suffered as though
a demon were in it; not a chair, not a mirror, not a carpet, was left
untouched, and in the midst of the worst confusion the new mistress sat,
calm as the statue of Andrew Jackson in the square under her eyes, and
issued her orders with as much decision as that hero had ever shown.
Towards the close of the second day, victory crowned her forehead. A
new era, a nobler conceptio