most bewitching and
notable girls in America, was smothered under a mountain of work and
domestic bliss. So, although well aware that his will must perish at
times in the blaze of his passions, he was iron against the temptation
that held itself sufficiently aloof. To an extreme point he was master
of himself. He knew that it would be no whirlwind and forgetting with
this mysterious woman, who had set the town talking, and yet whose
social talents were so remarkable that she managed women as deftly as
she did men, and was a welcome guest in many of the most exclusive
houses in New York; the men were careful to do none of their gossiping
at home, and the women, although they criticised, and vowed themselves
scandalized, succumbed to her royal command of homage and her air of
proud invincibility. That she loved him, he had reason to know, and
although he regarded it as a young woman's romantic passion for a public
man focussing the attention of the country, and whom, from pressure of
affairs, it was almost impossible to meet, still the passion existed,
and, considering her beauty and talents, was too likely to communicate
itself to the object, were he rash enough to create the opportunity.
Hamilton's morals were the morals of his day,--a day when aristocrats
were libertines, receiving as little censure from society as from their
own consciences. His Scotch foundations had religious shoots in their
grassy crevices, but religion in a great mind like Hamilton's is an
emotional incident, one of several passions which act independently of
each other. He avoided temptation, not because he desired to shun a
torment of conscience or an accounting with his Almighty,--to Whom he
was devoted,--but because he was satisfied with the woman he had married
and would have sacrificed his ambitions rather than deliberately cause
her unhappiness. Had she been jealous and eloquent, it is more than
probable that his haughty intolerance of restraint would have driven him
to assert the pleasure of his will, but she was only amused at his
occasional divagations, and had no thought of looking for meanings which
might terrify her. He was quite conscious of his good fortune and too
well balanced to risk its loss. So Mrs. Croix might be driven to rest
her hopes on a trick of chance or a _coup de theatre_. But she was a
very clever woman; and she was not unlike Hamilton in a quite phenomenal
precocity, and in the torrential nature of her passions.

Ha