Empire

1

CAROLINE HAD PROMISED to look in on Adams before the White House dinner in celebration, for once, of nothing; and true to her word, she arrived, wearing in her hair the diamonds that she had inherited that autumn from Mrs. Delacroix, who had proved, after all, not to be immortal; who had proved, above all, to be grateful for whatever “expiation” that Caroline might have made in her coming to terms with Blaise, and their common past.

Adams sat beside his Mexican onyx fireplace, looking more small and isolated than usual. “I see no one. Except nieces. I am no one. Except an uncle. You are beautiful as nieces go…”

“You should be happy.” Caroline settled before the fire; and refused William’s offer of sherry. “You have Mrs. Cameron in the Square. What more can you want?”

“Yes, La Dona makes a difference.” The previous year, Mrs. Cameron had reinstalled herself and Martha at 21 Lafayette Square. She was, again, queen of Washington, for what that might be worth: to Adams, apparently, nothing. Although a year had passed, he was still not reconciled to John Hay’s death on July 1, 1905. Adams had been in France when the news came; and so had not been able to go to Cleveland, where Hay was buried, beside Del, in the presence of all the great of the land. Ironically, Adams had been with Cabot and Sister Anne Lodge when the news came; and it was said that the Benevolent Porcupine had, one by one, shot each of his poisoned quills into the fragile senatorial hide, blaming, not entirely unfairly, Lodge for Hay’s death.

“Anyway, I’m bored. I’m mouldy. I’m breaking fast. I’ve nothing, nothing to live for…”

“Us. The nieces. Your twelfth-century book, which you must have finished for the twelfth time now. And, best of all, as you said yourself, you will never again have to see, in this life, Theodore Roosevelt.”

Adams’s eyes were suddenly bright. “You do know how to cheer me up! You’re absolutely right. I shall never set foot in that house again. The relief is enormous. I have also quarantined Cabot, and if it weren’t for Sister Anne, I’d relieve myself of all Lodges. Why are you going tonight?”

“I am still a publisher. I’m also the only publisher of the Tribune who’s welcome. The President is furious with Blaise, for helping out in the Hearst campaign.”

“Hearst.” Adams managed to hiss the “s”; thus the serpent in Eden celebrated evil. “If he is elected governor of New York, he’ll be living over there in two years’ time.”

Caroline tended to agree. Although Hearst had lost the election for mayor of New York, in a three-way race, he had come within a handful of votes of winning it. Only a last-minute burning of ballots by Murphy of Tammany Hall had secured the election for McClellan. Hearst was now behaving like a Shakespearean tragic hero, in search of a fifth act.

With remarkable skill, Hearst had created his own political machine within New York State, and now he was prepared to seize the governorship, with Blaise’s help. Caroline was not certain quite why her apolitical brother had decided to come to the aid of a publishing rival, unless that was the reason. If Hearst were to become governor, president-Cawdor, Scotland-he might be obliged to sell off his newspapers, and Blaise would want them. So, for that matter, would Caroline.

“I’ve always hoped that in my senility I wouldn’t, like the first three Adamses, turn against democracy. But I detect the signs. Racing pulse, elevated temperature; horror of immigrants-oh, the revelation in Heidegg! Even John was horrified to what an extent we’ve lost our country. Roman Catholics are bad enough. Yes, my child, I know you’re one, and even I tend, at times, to the untrue True Church, but the refuse of the Mediterranean, the detritus of Mitteleuropa, and the Jews, the Jews…”

“You will have a stroke, Uncle Henry.” Caroline was firm. “One day your hobby-horse will throw you.”

“I can’t wait to be thrown. But I’m always astride. That’s because I’m nobody. Power is poison, you know.”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to taste it.”

“The problem is what I call Bostonitis. The habit of the double standard, which can be an inspiration for a man of letters, but fatal to a politician.” Adams picked up a folder beside his chair. “Letters to John Hay. Letters by John Hay. Clara’s been collecting them. She wants to publish.”

Caroline had, from time to time, received a note from Hay. He was a marvellous letter-writer, which meant that he was always indiscreet. “Is that a good idea?”

“Probably not. I’m sure Theodore will think not. Hay liked him, but saw all his faults. Worse, his absurdities. Great men cannot bear to be thought, ever, absurd.”

“Publish! And be praised.”

“I think I will edit them.”

“Why not write his life?”

Adams shook his head. “It would be my life, too.”

“Write that, then.”

“After St. Augustine, I’d look more than usually inept. He did best what cannot be done at all-mix narrative and didactic purpose and style. Rousseau couldn’t do it at all. At least Augustine had an idea of a literary form-a notion of writing a story with an end and object, not for the sake of the object, but for the form, like a romance. I come at the wrong time.”

“But you occupy the right space,” said Caroline. “Anyway, I don’t believe in time…”

“Are you content?” Adams looked at her closely.

“I think so. I wanted to be-myself, not just a wife or mother or…”

“Niece?”

“That I wanted most of all.” Caroline was entirely serious. “But then I have never confessed to you just how ambitious I am. You see,” she took the great plunge, “I wanted to be a Heart.”

“Oh, my child!” Adams struck a note that she had never heard before. There was no irony, no edge to that beautiful voice. “You are one. Didn’t you know?”

“I wanted to-know.” She was tentative.

“That is it. That is all there is, to want to know…”

Elizabeth Cameron and Martha entered; each was dressed appropriately for the White House dinner.

“We’ve heard from Whitelaw Reid,” said Lizzie, after her usual warm but not too warm greeting of Caroline. “Martha’s to be presented at court, June the first, and you know what Martha said?”

“ ‘I’d rather stay in Paris’ is what Martha said,” said Martha.

“You must give pleasure to Whitelaw. He has so many presentations to make and so few presentables.” Adams had greeted Whitelaw Reid’s appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s with exuberant derision. Reid’s pursuit of office and its attendant pomp had, finally, been rewarded by the President, who had required that all ambassadors and ministers resign after the election. Everyone had now been moved round-or out.

“I do it for Mother.” Martha would never be beautiful, Caroline decided, but she might yet cease to be plain.

The clocks were carefully checked, and it was agreed that the three ladies share the same carriage to get them across the perilous wintry waste of Pennsylvania Avenue, a matter of so many icy yards.

Adams rose and showed them to the door of his study; he kissed each on the cheek.

“I hope Cabot won’t be there,” said Lizzie. “I have a permanent grudge against him, since John died.”

“Be forgiving, Dona.” Adams smiled his secret smile. “Life is far too long to hold a grudge.”

The Lodges were not present; the dinner was relatively small; and there was no theme, which Caroline enjoyed. Of the Cabinet, only Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, was present. He and Caroline gravitated toward each other in the Red Room, where the company was gathered before dinner. The Roosevelts never made their regal entrance until everyone was present.

“What is your brother doing?” was Root’s less than ceremonious greeting.

“He is travelling through New York State, enjoying the scenery.”

“I am alarmed. We’re all alarmed. You know, Hearst was really elected mayor of New York. Then Tammany destroyed the ballots.”

“Then why are you alarmed? When he’s elected governor, Tammany will just burn the ballots all over again. Fraud is the principal check-or is it balance?-of your-sorry, our-Constitution.”

Root’s mock alarm was replaced by, if not real alarm, unease. “We can’t rely on our most ancient check this time. Hearst has made a deal. He’s going to be Tammany’s candidate.”

“Is this possible?” Caroline was startled.

“Everything’s possible with those terrible people. Warn your brother away.”

As Caroline was explaining why Blaise accepted no warnings from her, Alice Roosevelt and her new husband, Nicholas Long-worth, made their entrance. Root looked at his watch. “Amazing! She’s arriving before her father. Nick’s influence, obviously.”

Alice looked, if not blooming, as in a rose, bronze, as in a chrysanthemum, while her husband’s bald head was scarlet from sunburn. They had been married in mid-February, with great pomp, in the East Room; then they had gone to Cuba for their honeymoon. This was their first White House function, as man and wife. Alice joined Root and Caroline. “Well, I’ve been to the top of San Juan Hill, and it’s absolutely nothing. I looked for the jungle-remember the famous jungle? where Father stood among the flying bullets, ricocheting off trees, and parrots and flamingos-I always added them to every description-sailed about? Well, the place couldn’t be duller. The hill’s a bump, and there is no jungle. All that fuss about so little. But they gave us something called a daiquiri, made with rum. After that, I remember nothing.”

The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt were announced, rather as if they were the Second Coming, and Theodore conducted himself rather as if he were God, surveying, with quiet satisfaction, His Creation. Edith Roosevelt looked tired, as befitted God’s conscientious consort.

The President greeted Caroline with his usual amiability, usual because the Tribune usually supported him. As a reward, he would occasionally ask her to the White House, where he would give her a story-usually minor-that no one else had yet printed. He was even stouter and redder this season, she noted; apparently, the vigorous, strenuous life he advocated for others and practiced himself was not, of itself, thinning. “You must come to lunch, and tell me about France. I envy you last summer. If I ever get away from here…”

“Come to us, Mr. President.”

“Delighted!”

“What, if I may cease to be a lady at court for an instant, is going to happen to the Hepburn Bill?” This was a commanding work of legislation which the House of Representatives had passed the previous year. The regulation of railroad rates was, somehow, at the center of the national psyche. The progressive saw it as a necessary means of controlling the buccaneer railroad operators, while the conservative courts and Senate saw it as the first fine cutting edge of socialism, the one thing that all Americans were taught from birth to abhor. Characteristically, Roosevelt was vacillating. When he had needed money for his presidential campaign he had asked the railway magnate E. H. Harriman to dinner at the White House; no one knew what promises were exchanged. Yet Caroline had taken heed of one of Adams’s truisms which was so true as to be ungraspable by minds shaped from birth by an American education: “He who can make prices for necessaries commands the whole wealth of all the nation, precisely as he who can tax.” That said it all. But the ownership of the country controlled both Supreme Court and Senate, and so they need not give up anything, ever. “I shall stand fast, of course. I always do. To Principle. I’m sure I can bring Senator Aldrich around. One thing I won’t accept will be an amended bill.”

“How curious to see you allied with the populists, like Tillman…”

“Terrible man! But when the end is just, grievances are forgotten. We must make do. If we don’t, Brooks fears a revolution on the left or a coup d’état on the right. I tell him we are stronger-fibered than that. Even so…”

An aide, roped in gold, moved the President through the room to greet the other guests. “It was in this very room, on election night,” observed Root, “that Theodore told the press that he would not run for a second term of his own.”

“He must have been-temporarily-deranged,” observed Caroline, admiring Edith Roosevelt’s inevitable look of interest in the presence of even the most ruthless bore.

“I think he got the mad notion from mad Brooks, whom he was just quoting. In order to be profoundly helpful, Brooks went through several million unpublished Adams papers and found that both of the Adams presidents had thought that one term was quite enough, and despised what they called ‘the second-term business.’ ”

“On the sensible ground that since each had been defeated for a second term, the principle was despicable.”

“Exactly. Anyway, Theodore, in a vainglorious mood, said that there would be no second election for him.”

The fat little President was now showing off a new ju-jitsu hold to the German Ambassador, while Edith’s lips moved to form the three dread syllables “Thee-oh-dore.” “He’ll be bored. But then he will keep on governing through his successor-you, Mr. Root.”

“Never, Mrs. Sanford. First, I’d not allow it. Second, I won’t be his successor.” Root’s dark eyes glittered. “I’m not presidential. But if I was, I’d tell my predecessor to go home to Oyster Bay, and write a book. You do this job alone, or not at all. Anyway, he can bask in glory. He loved war, and gave us the canal. He loved peace, and got the Japanese and the Russians to sign a peace treaty. He will be, forever-which in politics is four years-known as Theodore the Great.”

“Great,” murmured Caroline, “what?”

“Politician,” said Root. “It’s a craft, if not an art.”

“Like acting.”

“Or newspaper publishing.”

“No, Mr. Root. We create, like the true artist. News is what we invent…”

“But you must describe the principal actors…”

“We do, but only as we see you…”

“You make me feel,” said Root, “like Little Nell.”

“I feel,” said Caroline, “like the author of Freckles.”

On the way in to dinner, Alice told her of the great advantage of matronhood. “You can have your own motor car, and Father has nothing more to say.”

“This means that you’re a socialist.”

For once Alice was stopped in her own flow. “A socialist, why?”

“You missed the story. You were in Cuba. The new president of Princeton said that nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of the automobile.”

“He sounds mad. What’s his name?”

“I don’t remember. But Colonel Harvey at Harper’s Weekly says that he will be president.”

“… of Princeton?”

“The United States.”

“Fat,” said Alice, “chance. We’ve got it.”

2

BLAISE WAS FILLED WITH ADMIRATION for Hearst, who had managed to make himself the candidate of the independent lovers of good government, forever hostile to the political bosses, while simultaneously picking up the support of Murphy of Tammany Hall, and a half-dozen equally unsavory princes of darkness around the country who, should he be elected governor of New York in November, would make him the party’s candidate against Roosevelt’s replacement. Hearst had adopted the Roosevelt formula: with the support of the bosses, you run against them. Hearst had even announced, with his best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger compassion, “Murphy may be for me, but I’m not for Murphy.” Thus, the alliance was made and the tomahawks in the Tammany wigwam currently buried.

In due course, Hearst became the Democratic candidate for governor as well as the nominee of his own now potent machine, the Municipal Ownership League. The Republican candidate was a distinguished if dim lawyer, Charles Evans Hughes, known as the scourge of the corrupt insurance companies. He was considered no match for Hearst, whose fame was now total.

When, in April, San Francisco had been levelled by earthquake and fire, Hearst had taken over the rescue work; had fed people; sent out relief trains; raised money through Congress and his newspapers. Had anyone but Hearst been so awesomely the good managing angel, he would have been a national hero and the next president. As it was, he was forever associated not only with yellow journalism, to which most people were indifferent, but with socialism (he favored an eight-hour work day), the nemesis of all good Americans, eager to maintain their masters in luxury and themselves in the hope of someday winning a lottery. Yet despite so many handicaps, Blaise could not see how Hearst was to be stopped.

At the end of October, on a bright cold morning, Blaise boarded Hearst’s private car, Rêva, on a railroad siding at Albany. He was greeted by the inevitable George, now grown to Tart-like proportions. “It never stops, Mr. Blaise. The Chief’s in the parlor. Mrs. Hearst won’t get out of bed, and little George won’t go to bed. I can’t wait till this is over.”

To Blaise’s relief, Hearst was alone, going through a stack of newspapers. The blond hair was turning, with age, not gray but a curious brown. He looked up at Blaise, and smiled briefly. “Seven in the morning’s the only time I’ve got to myself. Look what Bennett’s done to me in the Herald.” Hearst held up a picture, with the headline “Hearst’s California Palace” and the sub-head “Built with coolie labor.”

“You don’t have a house in California, with or without coolies.”

Hearst dropped the newspaper. “Of course I don’t. It’s Mother’s house. Built by the Irish, I think, years ago. Well, it’s in the bag.”

Blaise settled in an armchair, and a steward served them coffee. “The animated feather-duster,” Hearst’s name for Charles Evans Hughes, “is getting nowhere. No organization. No popular support.” Hearst gave Blaise a general impression of the campaign thus far. The entire Democratic ticket seemed to be winning; and Hughes could not ignite popular opinion despite the anti-Hearst press (the entire press not owned by Hearst), which was outdoing even Hearst himself when it came to inventions and libels. But the voters appeared unimpressed. “I’ve never seen such crowds.” Hearst’s pale eyes glittered. “And they’ll be back in two years’ time.”

“What about the Archbold letters?” For Blaise, the letters were the essential proof of the rottenness of a system that could not survive much longer. Either the people would overthrow the government or, more likely, the government would overthrow the people, and set up some sort of dictatorship or junta. Blaise suspected that if it came to the latter, Roosevelt would do a better job than Hearst.

“I don’t need the letters. I’m winning. The letters are for 1908. In case I have problems. You see, I’ll be the reform candidate then.”

“If I were you, I’d use them now. Hit Roosevelt before he hits you.”

“Why bother?” Hearst chewed on a lump of sugar. “There’s nothing Four Eyes can do to me, in this state, anyway.”

The following Sunday, Blaise arrived at Caroline’s Georgetown house; on the first of the year she would move into her new house in Dupont Circle, close by the Pattersons.

Blaise knocked on the door; there was no answer. He tried the door handle; it turned. As he stepped inside the entrance foyer, Jim Day appeared on the staircase, tying his tie.

For an instant they stared, frozen, at each other. Then Jim finished his tie, as coolly as he could; the face was attractively flushed, the way it had been on the river-boat in St. Louis. “Caroline’s upstairs,” he said. “I have to go.” They met on the stairs; but did not shake hands. As Jim passed him, Blaise smelled the familiar warm scent.

Caroline was in her bed, wearing a dressing gown trimmed with white feathers. “Now,” she greeted Blaise, in a high tragic Olga Nethersole voice, “you know.”

“Yes.” Blaise sat opposite her, in a love-seat, and tried to look for signs of love-making. Except for a large crumpled towel on the floor, there were no clues to what had taken place-how many times? and why had he never suspected?

“It is all quite respectable. Since Jim is Emma’s father, we must keep this in the family. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.” Blaise saw the whole thing clearly at last, including the otherwise meaningless marriage to John. He did his best not to imagine Jim’s body on the bed, all brown skin and smooth muscles. “It would be the end of him, if Kitty knew,” he added, gratuitously.

“Or the beginning.” Caroline was airy. “The world doesn’t end any more with an affair.”

“It does in politics, in his state.”

“If she were to divorce him, I’d fill the breach, as best I could. That’s not the worst fate, is it?”

“For him, probably.” Blaise was, obscurely, furious.

But what might have been obscure to him was blazingly plain to Caroline. “You’re jealous,” she teased. “You want him, too. Again.”

Blaise thought that he might, like some human volcano, erupt with-blood? “What are you talking about?” He could do no better, aware that he had given himself away.

“I said-I repeat we should keep all this in the family as,” she smiled mischievously, “we seem to have done, anyway. We have the same tastes, in men, anyway…”

“You bitch!”

“Comme tu est drôle, enfin. Cette orage…” Then Caroline shifted to English, the language of business. “If you try to make trouble between Jim and Kitty, or Jim and me, your night of passion aboard the river-boat, with poor Jim, doing his innocent best to give you pleasure, will be as ruinous for you as anything you can do to him or to me or to poor blind Kitty.” Caroline swung her legs over the side of the bed, and put on her slippers. “Control yourself. You’ll have a stroke one of these days, and Frederika will be a widow, as well as my best friend.”

In the back of Blaise’s mind, there had always been the thought-hope-that he and Jim might one day reenact what had happened aboard the river-boat. But, ever since, the embarrassed Jim had kept his distance; and once again, Caroline was triumphant. From Tribune to Jim, Caroline had got everything that he had wanted. In the presence of so much good fortune, Blaise was conscious of a certain amount of sulphur in the air. But for now at least, he must be cool, serene, alert.

“The White House thinks that Hearst will win.” Caroline was at her dressing table, rebuilding her hair.

“So do I. So does he. So does the animated feather-duster.”

“Mr. Root is going to Utica.” Caroline pulled her hair straight back and stared into the mirror, without apparent pleasure.

“What does that mean?”

“The President is sending him. To Hearst.”

“Too late.”

“Mr. Root carries great weight in New York. As the President’s emissary… I would be nervous if I were Mr. Hearst.”

But all Blaise wanted to speak of was Jim, and that, of course, was the only subject that he and Caroline could never again mention to each other.

Blaise was with the Chief in New York City when the Secretary of State spoke in Utica. It was the first of November. The weather was peculiarly dismal, even for New York, and a drizzle that was neither snow nor rain made muddy the streets.

Hearst had his own news-wire in his study, set up between busts of Alexander the Great and-why?-Tiberius. Blaise was at his side as the message from Utica came through, even as Root was speaking. Elsewhere in the room, Brisbane kept a number of politicians in a good mood, an easy task since none doubted that soon they would all be going to Albany in the train of the conquering Hearst.

As read, line by line, the speech was lapidary. Root’s style was Roman, school of Caesar rather than Cicero. The short sentences were hurled like so many knives at a target; and none missed. Absentee congressman. Hypocrite-capitalist. False friend of labor. Creature of the bosses. Demagogue in the press and in politics, pitting class against class.

“Well,” said the Chief, with a small smile, “I’ve heard worse.”

But Blaise suspected that he was indeed about to hear worse; and he did, toward the end. Root read Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain, calling for McKinley’s murder. Hearst stiffened as the familiar words stuttered past them on the wire. Root quoted other Hearstian indictments of McKinley, inciting the mad anarchist to murder. Then Root quoted Roosevelt’s original attack on the “exploiter of sensationalism” who must share, equally, in the murder of the beloved-by-all President McKinley.

Hearst was now very pale, as the thin ribbon of text passed through his fingers to Blaise’s. “I say, by the President’s authority, that in penning these words, with the horror of President McKinley’s murder fresh before him, he had Mr. Hearst specifically in mind.”

“The son of a bitch,” whispered Hearst. “When I finish with him…”

The message went on: “And I say, by his authority, that what he thought of Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now.”

So it would be on the charge of regicide that Hearst was to be brought down at last. Blaise marvelled at the exactness with which Roosevelt, using Root for knife, struck the lethal blow.

“Champagne?” Brisbane approached with a bottle in hand.

“Why not?” The Chief, who never swore, having just sworn, who never drank, now drank. Then he turned to Blaise. “I want you to go over the Archbold letters with me.”

“With pleasure, if I can publish first.”

“Simultaneously, anyway, with me.”

3

CAROLINE WAS SHOWN INTO the Red Room, forever referred to by Roosevelt loyalists as the Room of the Great Error. She had received a last-minute invitation to a “family” dinner, which could well mean, considering the Roosevelt family, fifty people. But it was indeed, for the most part, family. Alice and her husband, Nick Longworth, were already there, with, to Caroline’s surprise, the sovereign himself, who sprang to his feet, rather like a Jack-in-the-box, and said, just like his music-hall imitators, “Dee-light-ed, Mrs. Sanford. Come sit here. By me.”

“Why not by us?” asked Alice.

“Because I want to talk to her and not to you.”

“There is no reason,” said Alice, “to be rude, simply because I’m the wife of a mere member of the House…”

But the President had turned his back on daughter and son-in-law, and led Caroline to a settee near the door, so situated that if the door was open, as now, the settee was invisible. Roosevelt practiced several unpleasant grimaces on Caroline, before he began. “You know about the Archbold letters?”

Caroline nodded. Trimble had received copies of a number but not the entire set. “I gather your brother Blaise has seen the lot.”

“We’re not speaking at the moment.”

“But if he decides to publish, they will appear in the Tribune.”

“If I decide to publish, they will appear in the Tribune.”

Roosevelt clicked his teeth three times, as if sending out a coded message to a ship in distress at sea. Then he removed his pince-nez and polished it thoroughly with a scrap of chamois. Caroline noticed how dull the eyes were without the enhancement of shining magnifying glass. “You are the majority shareholder?”

“Mr. Trimble and I are, and he does what I want him to do.”

“Good.” The pince-nez was again in its glittering place. “I hope good. Would you publish?”

“I would have to have a motive. Senator Foraker would have to introduce some legislation, favorable, let us say, to Standard Oil. Then I would publish, of course.”

“Of course! As you know, I have done-the Administration has done-nothing for Standard Oil. Quite the contrary.”

“But,” said Caroline boldly, “there are your letters to Archbold.”

“Which I don’t even recall. He was a friend, from years ago. He is a gentleman. I am certain there is nothing in anything that I ever wrote him that I would not be happy to see on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

Caroline arranged the spray of hot-house lilies that Marguerite had persuaded her, against her better judgment, to wear on a cold November night. “I’m afraid, Mr. President, that you will probably read those letters on every front page except mine, unless they prove-relevant.” Caroline liked the vagueness of the word.

“You mean that Hearst will publish?”

“Exactly. He wants revenge. Mr. Root-and you-lost him the election.”

“What did he expect? It is hardly usual for a republic to allow its own overthrow.” This was said with such swift savagery that Caroline was taken aback.

“You think Hearst would do that?”

“I put nothing past him. He is outside our law, our conventions, our republic. He believes in class war. That is why I would do anything to finish him off…”

“You did do everything, and he has said that he will never run for office again.” The rage of Hearst had been something to behold. From a commanding lead he had, yet again, because of outside intervention, lost an election that was his: this time to the egregious Hughes. Of one and a half million votes cast, Hearst lost by fifty-eight thousand. Except for Hearst, every Democrat on the ticket had been elected, and the entirely unheard-of was at last heard of: the candidate for lieutenant governor, dimmest of posts, was won by an upstate Democrat, an aristocratic Chanler, hardly known for his appeal to the masses, or anything else. Roosevelt had finished Hearst; would Hearst return the compliment? “I gather,” said Caroline, “that as many Democrats are involved in Standard Oil payoffs as Republicans?”

“Which explains why this noble citizen, with his so-called proofs of corruption, has been delaying publication for what could be years, to help not justice but his own career.” Roosevelt was now speaking for eternity, and Edith, not one to abide too much eternity on an empty stomach, signalled that it was time to go in to dinner.