much time on horseback. When the season was over, they paid a round of
visits to country houses, and finished with the few weeks in New York
necessary for the replenishment of Miss Madison's wardrobe. She had
hoped to reach Washington for the opening of Congress, but her mother
had been ill, prolonging the last visit a fortnight, and gowns must be
consulted upon, fitted and altered did the world itself stand still.
And this was the one period of mental rest that Betty had experienced
since her parting from Senator North.

She had been much with people during these five months, seeking and
finding little solitude, and few had found any change in her beyond a
deeper shade of indifference and more infrequent flashes of humour.
She permitted men to amuse her if she did not amuse them, to all out-
door sports she was faithful, and she read the new books and talked
intelligently of the fashions. When the conversation swung with the
precision of a pendulum from clothes and love to war with Spain, her
mind leapt at once to action, and she argued every advocate of war
into a state of fury. She had responded heavily to the President's
appeal in behalf of the reconcentrados, but her mind was no longer
divided. The failure of the belligerency resolutions to reach the
attention of the House during the Extra Session of Congress had
rekindled the war fever in the country; and the constant chatter about
the suffering Cuban and the duty of the United States, the black
iniquity of the Speaker and the timidity of the President, were
wearying to the more evenly balanced members of the community. "You
say that we need a war," said Betty contemptuously one day, "that it
will shake us up and do us good. If we had fallen as low as that, no
war could lift us, certainly not the act of bullying a small country,
of rushing into a war with the absolute certainty of success. But we
need no war. American manhood is where it always has been and always