The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

clerk of two house committees, a “worker” in politics, and a confident

critic of every woman and every man in Washington. He would be a consul

no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was

ignorant–though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might

have been a consul at home. His easy familiarity with great men was

beautiful to see, and when Philip learned what a tremendous underground

influence this little ignoramus had, he no longer wondered at the queer

appointments and the queerer legislation.

Philip was not long in discovering that people in Washington did not

differ much from other people; they had the same meannesses,

generosities, and tastes: A Washington boarding house had the odor of a

boarding house the world over.

Col. Sellers was as unchanged as any one Philip saw whom he had known

elsewhere. Washington appeared to be the native element of this man.

His pretentions were equal to any he encountered there. He saw nothing

in its society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table

that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most

airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in

magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive

imagination.

“The country is getting along very well,” he said to Philip, “but our

public men are too timid. What we want is more money. I’ve told

Boutwell so. Talk about basing the currency on gold; you might as well

base it on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything!

You’ve got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops?

We must have improvements. Grant’s got the idea. We want a canal from

the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build it.”

It was difficult to get the Colonel off from these large themes when he

was once started, but Philip brought the conversation round to Laura and

her reputation in the City.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t noticed much. We’ve been so busy about this

University. It will make Laura rich with the rest of us, and she has

done nearly as much as if she were a man. She has great talent, and will

make a big match. I see the foreign ministers and that sort after her.

Yes, there is talk, always will be about a pretty woman so much in public

as she is. Tough stories come to me, but I put’em away. ‘Taint likely

one of Si Hawkins’s children would do that–for she is the same as a

child of his. I told her, though, to go slow,” added the Colonel, as if

that mysterious admonition from him would set everything right.

“Do you know anything about a Col. Selby?”

“Know all about him. Fine fellow. But he’s got a wife; and I told him,

as a friend, he’d better sheer off from Laura. I reckon he thought

better of it and did.”

But Philip was not long in learning the truth. Courted as Laura was by a

certain class and still admitted into society, that, nevertheless, buzzed

with disreputable stories about her, she had lost character with the best

people. Her intimacy with Selby was open gossip, and there were winks

and thrustings of the tongue in any group of men when she passed by.

It was clear enough that Harry’s delusion must be broken up, and that no

such feeble obstacle as his passion could interpose would turn Laura from

her fate. Philip determined to see her, and put himself in possession of

the truth, as he suspected it, in order to show Harry his folly.

Laura, after her last conversation with Harry, had a new sense of her

position. She had noticed before the signs of a change in manner towards

her, a little less respect perhaps from men, and an avoidance by women.

She had attributed this latter partly to jealousy of her, for no one is

willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive

can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances. But now, if

society had turned on her, she would defy it. It was not in her nature