FOR reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to
pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the
climate would do her good. In New York she had troops of friends, but she suddenly
became eager to see again the very small number of those who lived on the Potomac. It
was only to her closest intimates that she honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured
by ennui. Since her husband's death, five years before, she had lost her taste for New
York society; she had felt no interest in the price of stocks, and very little in the men
who dealt in them; she had become serious. What was it all worth, this wilderness of
men and women as monotonous as the brown stone houses they lived in? In her
despair she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the
original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much
culture should lead to nothing--nothing.
After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very literary transcendental
commission-merchant, she could not see that her time had been better employed than
when in former days she had passed it in flirting with a very agreeable young stock-
broker; indeed, there was an evident proof to the contrary, for the flirtation might lead to
something--had, in fact, led to marriage; while the philosophy could lead to nothing,
unless it were perhaps to another evening of the same kind, because transcendental
philosophers are mostly elderly men, usually married, and, when engaged in business,
somewhat apt to be sleepy towards evening. Nevertheless Mrs. Lee did her best to turn
her study to practical use. She plunged into philanthropy, visited prisons, inspected
hospitals, read the literature of pauperism and crime, saturated herself with the statistics
of vice, until her mind had nearly lost sight of virtue. At last it rose in rebellion against
her, and she came to the limit of her strength. This path, too, seemed to lead nowhere.
She declared that she had lost the sense of duty, and that, so far as concerned her, all
the paupers and criminals in New York might henceforward rise in their majesty and
manage every railway on the continent. Why should she care? What was the city to
her? She could find nothing in it that seemed to demand salvation. What gave peculiar
sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each other, any
way more interesting than one person? What aspiration could she help to put into the
mind of this great million-armed monster that would make it worth her love or respect?
Religion? A thousand powerful churches were doing their best, and she could see no
chance for a new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High
popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words irritated her.
Was she not herself devoured by ambition, and was she not now eating her heart out
because she could find no one object worth a sacrifice?
Was it ambition--real ambition--or was it mere restlessness that made Mrs. Lightfoot
Lee so bitter against New York and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston, American life in
general and all life in particular? What did she want? Not social position, for she herself
was an eminently respectable Philadelphian by birth; her father a famous clergyman;
