“Yes! at last I have reached the end! We shall grow to be wax images, and our talk will be like the squeaking of toy dolls. We shall all wander round and round the earth and shake hands. No one will have any object in this world, and there will be no other. It is worse than anything in the Inferno. What an awful vision of eternity!”
Suddenly, as through a mist, she saw the melancholy face of Lord Skye approaching. He came to her side, and his voice recalled her to reality.
“Does it amuse you, this sort of thing?” he asked in a vague way.
“We take our amusement sadly, after the manner of our people,” she replied; “but it certainly interests me.”
They stood for a time in silence, watching the slowly eddying dance of Democracy, until he resumed:
“Whom do you take that man to be—the long, lean one, with a long woman on each arm?”
“That man,” she replied, “I take to be a Washington department-clerk, or perhaps a member of Congress from Iowa, with a wife and wife’s sister. Do they shock your nobility?”
He looked at her with comical resignation. “You mean to tell me that they are quite as good as dowager-countesses. I grant it. My aristocratic spirit is broken, Mrs. Lee. I will even ask them to dinner if you bid me, and if you will come to meet them. But the last time I asked a member of Congress to dine, he sent me back a note in pencil on my own envelope that he would bring two of his friends with him, very respectable constituents from Yahoo city, or some such place; nature’s noblemen, he said.”
“You should have welcomed them.”
“I did. I wanted to see two of nature’s noblemen, and I knew they would probably be pleasanter company than their representative. They came; very respectable persons, one with a blue necktie, the other with a red one: both had diamond pins in their shirts, and were carefully brushed in respect to their hair. They said nothing, ate little, drank less, and were much better behaved than I am. When they went away, they unanimously asked me to stay with them when I visited Yahoo city.”
“You will not want guests if you always do that.”
“I don’t know. I think it was pure ignorance on their part. They knew no better, and they seemed modest enough. My only complaint was that I could get nothing out of them. I wonder whether their wives would have been more amusing.”
“Would they be so in England, Lord Skye?”
He looked down at her with half-shut eyes, and drawled: “You know my countrywomen?”
“Hardly at all.”
“Then let us discuss some less serious subject.”
“Willingly. I have waited for you to explain to me why you have tonight an expression of such melancholy.”
“Is that quite friendly, Mrs. Lee? Do I really look melancholy?”
“Unutterably, as I feel. I am consumed with curiosity to know the reason.”
The British minister coolly took a complete survey of the whole room, ending with a prolonged stare at the President and his wife, who were still mechanically shaking hands; then he looked back into her face, and said never a word.
She insisted: “I must have this riddle answered. It suffocates me. I should not be sad at seeing these same people at work or at play, if they ever do play; or in a church or a lecture-room. Why do they weigh on me like a horrid phantom here?”
“I see no riddle, Mrs. Lee. You have answered your own question; they are neither at work nor at play.”
“Then please take me home at once. I shall have hysterics. The sight of those two suffering images at the door is too mournful to be borne. I am dizzy with looking at these stalking figures. I don’t believe they’re real. I wish the house would take fire. I want an earthquake. I wish someone would pinch the President, or pull his wife’s hair.”
Mrs. Lee did not repeat the experiment of visiting the White House, and indeed for some time afterwards she spoke with little enthusiasm of the presidential office. To Senator Ratcliffe she expressed her opinions strongly. The Senator tried in vain to argue that the people had a right to call upon their chief magistrate, and that he was bound to receive them; this being so, there was no less objectionable way of proceeding than the one which had been chosen. “Who gave the people any such right?” asked Mrs. Lee. “Where does it come from? What do they want it for? You know better, Mr. Ratcliffe! Our chief magistrate is a citizen like anyone else. What puts it into his foolish head to cease being a citizen and to ape royalty? Our governors never make themselves ridiculous. Why cannot the wretched being content himself with living like the rest of us, and minding his own business? Does he know what a figure of fun he is?” And Mrs. Lee went so far as to declare that she would like to be the President’s wife only to put an end to this folly; nothing should ever induce her to go through such a performance; and if the public did not approve of this, Congress might impeach her, and remove her from office; all she demanded was the right to be heard
