There could be
no doubt that the honours and dignities of a public career were no
fair consideration for its pains. She made a little daily task for
herself of reading in succession the lives and letters of the
American Presidents, and of their wives, when she could find that
there was a trace of the latter's existence. What a melancholy
spectacle it was, from George Washington down to the last
incumbent; what vexations, what disappointments, what grievous
mistakes, what very objectionable manners! Not one of them, who
had aimed at high purpose, but had been thwarted, beaten, and
habitually insulted! What a gloom lay on the features of those
famous chieftains, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster; what varied
expression of defeat and unsatisfied desire; what a sense of
self-importance and senatorial magniloquence; what a craving for
flattery; what despair at the sentence of fate! And what did they
amount to, after all?
They were practical men, these! they had no great problems of
thought to settle, no questions that rose above the ordinary rules of
common morals and homely duty. How they had managed to befog
the subject! What elaborate show-structures they had built up, with
no result but to obscure the horizon! Would not the country have
done better without them? Could it have done worse? What deeper
abyss could have opened under the nation's feet, than that to whose
verge they brought it?
Madeleine's mind wearied with the monotony of the story.
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