The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

going to do to give her up?”

It seemed to Harry that it was a situation requiring some active

measures. He couldn’t realize that he had fallen hopelessly in love

without some rights accruing to him for the possession of the object of

his passion. Quiet resignation under relinquishment of any thing he

wanted was not in his line. And when it appeared to him that his

surrender of Laura would be the withdrawal of the one barrier that kept

her from ruin, it was unreasonable to expect that he could see how to

give her up.

Harry had the most buoyant confidence in his own projects always; he saw

everything connected with himself in a large way and in rosy lines. This

predominance of the imagination over the judgment gave that appearance of

exaggeration to his conversation and to his communications with regard to

himself, which sometimes conveyed the impression that he was not speaking

the truth. His acquaintances had been known to say that they invariably

allowed a half for shrinkage in his statements, and held the other half

under advisement for confirmation.

Philip in this case could not tell from Harry’s story exactly how much

encouragement Laura had given him, nor what hopes he might justly have of

winning her. He had never seen him desponding before. The “brag”

appeared to be all taken out of him, and his airy manner only asserted

itself now and then in a comical imitation of its old self.

Philip wanted time to look about him before he decided what to do.

He was not familiar with Washington, and it was difficult to adjust his

feelings and perceptions to its peculiarities. Coming out of the sweet

sanity of the Bolton household, this was by contrast the maddest Vanity

Fair one could conceive. It seemed to him a feverish, unhealthy

atmosphere in which lunacy would be easily developed. He fancied that

everybody attached to himself an exaggerated importance, from the fact of

being at the national capital, the center of political influence, the

fountain of patronage, preferment, jobs and opportunities.

People were introduced to each other as from this or that state, not from

cities or towns, and this gave a largeness to their representative

feeling. All the women talked politics as naturally and glibly as they

talk fashion or literature elsewhere. There was always some exciting

topic at the Capitol, or some huge slander was rising up like a miasmatic

exhalation from the Potomac, threatening to settle no one knew exactly

where. Every other person was an aspirant for a place, or, if he had

one, for a better place, or more pay; almost every other one had some

claim or interest or remedy to urge; even the women were all advocates

for the advancement of some person, and they violently espoused or

denounced this or that measure as it would affect some relative,

acquaintance or friend.

Love, travel, even death itself, waited on the chances of the dies daily

thrown in the two Houses, and the committee rooms there. If the measure

went through, love could afford to ripen into marriage, and longing for

foreign travel would have fruition; and it must have been only eternal

hope springing in the breast that kept alive numerous old claimants who

for years and years had besieged the doors of Congress, and who looked as

if they needed not so much an appropriation of money as six feet of

ground. And those who stood so long waiting for success to bring them

death were usually those who had a just claim.

Representing states and talking of national and even international

affairs, as familiarly as neighbors at home talk of poor crops and the

extravagance of their ministers, was likely at first to impose upon

Philip as to the importance of the people gathered here.

There was a little newspaper editor from Phil’s native town, the

assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about

the “first egg laid on our table,” and who was the menial of every

tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent “puffs,”

except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly

facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and

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