," said she.

To her eyes he was the high-priest of American politics; he was charged
with the meaning of the mysteries, the clue to political hieroglyphics.
Through him she hoped to sound the depths of statesmanship and to
bring up from its oozy bed that pearl of which she was in search; the
mysterious gem which must lie hidden somewhere in politics. She wanted
to understand this man; to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and
use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens. If there was good
or bad in him, she meant to find its meaning.

And he was a western widower of fifty; his quarters in Washington were
in gaunt boarding-house rooms, furnished only with public documents and
enlivened by western politicians and office-seekers. In the summer he
retired to a solitary, white framehouse with green blinds, surrounded
by a few feet of uncared-for grass and a white fence; its interior more
dreary still, with iron stoves, oil-cloth carpets, cold white walls, and
one large engraving of Abraham Lincoln in the parlour; all in Peonia,
Illinois! What equality was there between these two combatants? what
hope for him? what risk for her? And yet Madeleine Lee had fully her
match in Mr. Silas P. Ratcliffe.

Chapter III

MRS. Lee soon became popular. Her parlour was a favourite haunt of
certain men and women who had the art of finding its mistress at home;
an art which seemed not to be within the powers of everybody. Carrington
was apt to be there more often than any one else, so that he was looked
on as almost a part of the family, and if Madeleine wanted a book from
the library, or an extra man at her dinner-table, Carrington was pretty
certain to help her to the one or the other. Old Baron Jacobi, the
Bulgarian minister, fell madly in love with both sisters, as he commonly
did with every pretty face and neat figure. He was a witty, cynical,
broken-down Parisian roue, kept in Washington for years past by his
debts and his salary; always grumbling because there was no opera, and
mysteriously disappearing on visits to New York; a voracious devourer of
French and German literature, especially of novels; a man who seemed to
have met every noted or notorious personage of the century, and whose
mind was a magazine of amusing information; an excellent musical critic,
who was not afraid to criticise Sybil's singing; a connoisseur in
bric-a-brac, who laughed at Madeleine's display of odds and ends, and
occasionally brou