the newspapers, as well as private gossip,
had marked out Mrs. Lee as one who, by an alliance with Ratcliffe, was
aiming at supplanting her own rule over the White House.

Hence, when Mrs. Lightfoot Lee was announced, and the two sisters were
ushered into the presidential parlour, she put on a coldly patronizing
air, and in reply to Madeleine's hope that she found Washington
agreeable, she intimated that there was much in Washington which struck
her as awful wicked, especially the women; and, looking at Sybil, she
spoke of the style of dress in this city which she said she meant to do
what she could to put a stop to. She'd heard tell that people sent to
Paris for their gowns, just as though America wasn't good enough to make
one's clothes! Jacob (all Presidents' wives speak of their husbands by
their first names) had promised her to get a law passed against it. In
her town in Indiana, a young woman who was seen on the street in such
clothes wouldn't be spoken to. At these remarks, made with an air and
in a temper quite unmistakable, Madeleine became exasperated beyond
measure, and said that "Washington would be pleased to see the President
do something in regard to dress-reform--or any other reform;" and with
this allusion to the President's ante-election reform speeches, Mrs. Lee
turned her back and left the room, followed by Sybil in convulsions of
suppressed laughter, which would not have been suppressed had she seen
the face of their hostess as the door shut behind them, and the energy
with which she shook her head and said: "See if I don't reform you yet,
you--jade!"

Mrs. Lee gave Ratcliffe a lively account of this interview, and he
laughed nearly as convulsively as Sybil over it, though he tried to
pacify her by saying that the President's most intimate friends openly
declared his wife to be insane, and that he himself was the person most
afraid of her. But Mrs. Lee declared that the President was as bad as
his wife; that an equally good President and President's wife could be
picked up in any corner-grocery between the Lakes and the Ohio; and
that no inducement should ever make her go near that coarse washerwoman
again.

Ratcliffe did not attempt to change Mrs. Lee's opinion. Indeed he
knew better than any man how Presidents were made, and he had his
own opinions in regard to the process as well as the fabric produced.
Nothing Mrs. Lee could say now affected him. He threw off his
responsibility and she found