I've seen it developing for at least three years. At first you were
just a hard student, and then the loveliest young girl, only caring to
have a good time, and coquetting more bewitchingly than any girl I
ever saw. I don't see why you had to change."

"Time develops all of us, one way or another. I suppose you would like
me to be a charming girl flirting bewitchingly when I am forty-five. I
am finished with the meaningless things of life. I want to live now,
and I intend to."

"It will be wildly exciting--the Senate Gallery every day, and knowing
a lot of lank raw-boned Yankees with political beards." "I am not
expecting to fall in love with any of them. I merely discovered some
time since that I had a brain, and they happen to be the impulse that
possesses it. You always have prided yourself that I am intellectual,
and so I am in the flabby 'well-read' fashion. I feel as if my brain
had been a mausoleum for skeletons and mummies; it felt alive for the
first time when I began to read the newspapers in England. I want no
more memoirs and letters and biographies, nor even of the history that
is shut up in calf-skin. I want the life of to-day. I want to feel in
the midst of current history. All these men here in Washington must be
alive to their finger-tips. Sally Carter admires Senator North and
Senator Maxwell immensely."

"What does she say about politicians in general?" Mrs. Madison looked
almost distraught. "Of course the Norths and the Maxwells come of good
New England families--I never did look down on the North as much as
some of us did; after all, nearly three hundred years are very
respectable indeed--and if these two men had not been in politics I
should have been delighted to receive them. I met Senator North once--