“The damned Yankees!” he sneered. “They think they’ve got the brains of the nation.”
“Why not make a speech on the subject?” she suggested.
He laughed. The matter under discussion was the cotton-goods schedule of the new tariff bill, about which really he knew a little; his wife placed every temptation to knowledge before him, even inspiring Senator Smith to ask him to defend that schedule against the low-tariff advocate. Mary Cresswell worked with redoubled energy, and for nearly a week Harry stayed at home nights and studied. Thanks to his wife the speech was unusually informing and well put, and the fact that a prominent free-trader spoke the same afternoon gave it publicity, while Mr. Easterly saw to the press despatches.
Cresswell subscribed to a clipping-bureau and tasted the sweets of dawning notoriety, and Mrs. Cresswell arranged a select dinner-party which included a cabinet officer, a foreign ambassador, two millionaires, and the leading Southern Congressmen. The talk came around to the failure of the Senate to confirm Mr. Vanderpool, and it was generally assumed that the President would not force the issue.
Who, then, should be nominated? There were several suggestions, but the knot of Southern Congressmen about Mrs. Cresswell declared emphatically that it must be a Southerner. Not since the war had a prominent Southerner represented America at a first-class foreign court; it was shameful; the time was ripe for change. But who? Here opinions differed widely. Nearly everyone mentioned a candidate, and those who did not seemed to refrain from motives of personal modesty.
Mary Cresswell sped her departing guests with a distinct purpose in mind. She must make herself leader of the Southern set in Washington and concentrate its whole force on the appointment of Harry Cresswell as ambassador to France. Quick reward and promotion were essential to Harry’s success. He was not one to keep up the strain of effort a long time. Unless, then, tangible results came and came quickly, he was liable to relapse into old habits. Therefore he must succeed and succeed at once. She would have preferred a less ornamental position than the ambassadorship, but there were no other openings. The Alabama senators were firmly seated for at least four years and the Governorship had been carefully arranged for. A term of four years abroad, however, might bring Harry Cresswell back in time for greater advancement. At any rate, it was the only tangible offering, and Mary Cresswell silently determined to work for it.
Here it was that she made her mistake. It was one thing for her to be a tactful hostess, pleasing her husband and his guests; it was another for her to aim openly at social leadership and political influence. She had at first all the insignia of success. Her dinners became of real political significance and her husband figured more and more as a leading Southerner. The result was twofold. Cresswell, on the one hand, with his usual selfishness, took his rising popularity as a matter of course and as the fruits of his own work; he was rising, he was making valuable speeches, he was becoming a social power, and his only handicap was his plain and overambitious wife. But on the other hand Mrs. Cresswell forgot two pitfalls: the cleft between the old Southern aristocracy and the pushing new Southerners; and above all, her own Northern birth and presumably pro-Negro sympathies.
What Mrs. Cresswell forgot Mrs. Vanderpool sensed unerringly. She had heard with uneasiness of Cresswell’s renewed candidacy for the Paris ambassadorship, and she set herself to block it. She had worked hard. The President stood ready to send her husband’s appointment again to the Senate whenever Easterly could assure him of favorable action. Easterly had long and satisfactory interviews with several senators, while the Todd insurgents were losing heart at the prospect of choosing between Vanderpool and Cresswell. At present four Southern votes were needed to confirm Vanderpool; but if they could not be had, Easterly declared it would be good politics to nominate Cresswell and give him Republican support. Manifestly, then, Mrs. Vanderpool’s task was to discredit the Cresswells with the Southerners. It was not a work to her liking, but the die was cast and she refused to contemplate defeat.
The result was that while Mrs. Cresswell was giving large and brilliant parties to the whole Southern contingent, Mrs. Vanderpool was engineering exclusive dinners where old New York met stately Charleston and gossiped interestingly. On such occasions it was hinted not once, but many times, that the Cresswells were well enough, but who was that upstart wife who presumed to take social precedence?
It was not, however, until Mrs. Cresswell’s plan for an all-Southern art exhibit in Washington that Mrs. Vanderpool, in a flash of inspiration, saw her chance. In the annual exhibit of the Corcoran Art Gallery, a Southern girl had nearly won first prize over a Western man. The concensus of Southern opinion was that the judgment had been unfair, and Mrs. Cresswell was convinced of this. With quick intuition she suggested a Southern exhibit with such social prestige back of
