and South, this momentary contact with Southern character was a
sort of education for its own sake; but this was not all. No
doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to
self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that
the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations, was as little
fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life as though he were
still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and hunting the bos
primigenius, and that every quality in which he was strong, made
him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this respect
one eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from another.
Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century
before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent. He
was little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future
America which showed no fancy for the past. Already Northern
society betrayed a preference for economists over diplomats or
soldiers -- one might even call it a jealousy -- against which
two eighteenth-century types had little chance to live, and which
they had in common to fear.

Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into
close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry
Adams, but the chief difference between them as collegians
consisted only in their difference of scholarship: Lee was a
total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his
failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of
escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield
Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons. He
asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flattered
Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could do,