his friends, purifying
his house; and then, with the heat of righteous battle still upon him,
with its gore, so to speak, still upon his hands, of turning his mind,
without a pause and without hypocrisy, to things intimate and soft and
pure--the domestic sweetness of Penelope, the young promise of
Telemachus. The President stood, a rugged figure, amid the cosmopolitan
crowd, breasting the modern world, like some ocean headland, yet not
truly of it, one of the great fighters and workers of mankind, with a
laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue some
converse of their own, and a hand that grasped and cheered, where other
hands withdrew and repelled. This one man's will had now, for some
years, made the pivot on which vast issues turned--issues of peace and
war, of policy embracing the civilized world; and, here, one saw him in
drawing-rooms, discussing Alaric's campaigns with an Oxford professor,
or chatting with a young mother about her children.

Beside him, the human waves, as they met and parted, disclosed a woman's
face, modelled by nature in one of her lightest and deftest moods, a
trifle detached, humorous also, as though the world's strange sights
stirred a gentle and kindly mirth behind its sweet composure. The
dignity of the President's wife was complete, yet it had not
extinguished the personality it clothed; and where royalty, as the
European knows it, would have donned its mask and stood on its defence,
Republican royalty dared to be its amused, confiding, natural self.

All around--the political, diplomatic world of Washington. General
Hobson, as he passed through it, greeted by what was now a large
acquaintance, found himself driven once more to the inward
confession--the grudging confession--as though Providence had not played
him fair in extorting it--that American politicians were of a vastly
finer stamp than he had expected to find them. The American press was
all--he vowed--that fancy had painted it, and more. But, as he looked
about him at the members of the President's administration--at this
tall, black-haired man, for instance, with the mild and meditative eye,
the equal, social or intellectual, of any Foreign Minister that Europe
might pit against him, or any diplomat that might be sent to handle him;
or this younger man, sparely built, with the sane, handsome face--son of
a famous father, modest, amiable, efficient; or this other, of huge bulk
and height, the sport of