amusement there might be in politics.

Her friends asked what kind of amusement she expected to find
among the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in Washington
represented constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York
was a New Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She
replied that if Washington society were so bad as this, she should
have gained all she wanted, for it would be a pleasure to
return,--precisely the feeling she longed for. In her own mind,
however, she frowned on the idea of seeking for men. What she
wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests
of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at
Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and
uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces
of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she
wanted, was POWER.

Perhaps the force of the engine was a little confused in her mind
with that of the engineer, the power with the men who wielded it.
Perhaps the human interest of politics was after all what really
attracted her, and, however strongly she might deny it, the passion
for exercising power, for its own sake, might dazzle and mislead a
woman who had exhausted all the ordinary feminine resources.
But why speculate about her motives? The stage was before her,
the curtain was rising, the actors were ready to enter; she had only
to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and see how the play
was acted and the stage effects were produced; how the great
tragedians mouthed, and the stage-manager swore.

Chapter II