he was a little puzzled to decide which symbol was the more
correct. No one then dreamed of four years' war, but every one
dreamed of secession. The symbol for either might well be matter
of doubt.

This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys,
was a politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing
else. He should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of
George Washington, a statesman designated by destiny, with
nothing to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march.
On the contrary, he was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself
shut out of Boston as though he were an exile; he never thought
of himself as a Bostonian; he never looked about him in Boston,
as boys commonly do wherever they are, to select the street they
like best, the house they want to live in, the profession they
mean to practise. Always he felt himself somewhere else; perhaps
in Washington with its social ease; perhaps in Europe; and he
watched with vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the
Cunard steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and
disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day might be,
as though the steamers were offering to take him away, which was
precisely what they were doing.

Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when
Henry Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas
were more than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary,
mathematical result of conditions old as history and fixed as
fate -- invariable sequence in man's experience. The only idea