wever,
beaming and gracious, but no less rigid than "Lady Washington," in her
social statutes, looked like a bird of paradise beside a graven image,
so gorgeous was her raiment. Baron Steuben was in the regalia of war and
a breastplate of orders. Kitty Livingston, now Mrs. Matthew Ridley, had
also received a fine new gown of Mrs. Church's selection, for the two
women still were friends, despite the rupture of their families. Lady
Kitty Duer, so soon to know poverty and humiliation, was in a gown of
celestial blue over a white satin petticoat, her lofty head surmounted
by an immense gauze turban. General and Mrs. Knox, fat, amiable, and
always popular, although sadly inflated by their new social importance,
were mountains of finery. Mrs. Ralph Izard, Mrs. Jay's rival in beauty,
and Mrs. Adams's in wit, painted by Gainsborough and Copley, wore a
white gown of enviable simplicity, and a string of large pearls in her
hair, another about her graceful throat. Mrs. Schuyler, stout and
careworn, from the trials of excitable and eloping daughters, clung to
the kind arm of her austere and silent husband. Fisher Ames, with his
narrow consumptive figure and his flashing ardent eyes, his eloquent
tongue chilled by this funereal assemblage, had retreated to an alcove
with Rufus King, where they whispered politics. Burr, the target of many
fine eyes, was always loyal to his wife in public; she was a charming
and highly respected woman, ten years his senior. Burr fascinated women,
and adorned his belt with their scalps; but had it not been for this
vanity, which led him to scatter hints of infinite devilment and
conquest, it is not likely that he would have been branded, in that era
of gallantry, a devirginator and a rake. All that history is concerned
with is his utter lack of patriotism and honesty, and the unscrupulous
selfishness, from which, after all, he suffered more than any man. His
dishonesties and his treasonable attempts were failures, but he left a
bitter legacy in his mastery of the arts of political corruption, and in
a glittering personality which, with his misfortunes, has begodded him
with the shallow and ignorant, who know the traditions of history and
none of its facts. He was a poor creature, with all his gifts, for his
life was a failure, his old age one of the loneliest and bitterest in
history; and from no cause that facts or tradition give us but the blind
selfishness which blunted a good understanding to stupidi