In spite of the fatal deception -- or undeception -- about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington
had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He
loved it too much to question its value. What did he know about
its value, or what did any one know? His father knew more about
it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused to find that
his father, whose recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for
Washington much the same sentimental weakness, and described the
society about President Monroe much as his son felt the society
about President Johnson. He feared its effect on young men, with
some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his brothers; but
he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy or
Boston was not likely to deaden it.

Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every
tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to
amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made
in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would
have been a success. One of these errors was the inclination of
the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and
the saddest thought about the last was that it should have been
so modern. Adams, in his splenetic temper, held that both these
unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst on Boston. The climate
made eternal war on society, and sex was a species of crime. The
ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as
thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong. The
thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of
education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his time.