Women
cannot be expected to go behind the motives of that patriot who
saves his country and his election in times of revolution.
Carrington's hostility to Ratcliffe was, however, mild, when
compared with that felt by old Baron Jacobi. Why the baron should
have taken so violent a prejudice it is not easy to explain, but a
diplomatist and a senator are natural enemies, and Jacobi, as an
avowed admirer of Mrs. Lee, found Ratcliffe in his way. This
prejudiced and immoral old diplomatist despised and loathed an
American senator as the type which, to his bleared European eyes,
combined the utmost pragmatical self-assurance and overbearing
temper with the narrowest education and the meanest personal
experience that ever existed in any considerable government. As
Baron Jacobi's country had no special relations with that of the
United States, and its Legation at Washington was a mere job to
create a place for Jacobi to fill, he had no occasion to disguise his
personal antipathies, and he considered himself in some degree as
having a mission to express that diplomatic contempt for the
Senate which his colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to
conceal. He performed his duties with conscientious precision. He
never missed an opportunity to thrust the sharp point of his
dialectic rapier through the joints of the clumsy and hide-bound
senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully exposing to
Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance.
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