Garwood otherwise was most of the time out of her sight. She had observed in him a new interest in life the moment his feet touched the stones of Washington. He went about with a quick, elastic step, he was full of enthusiasm and laughter, and if he kept her waiting for him long at meal time, he returned to her with ample apologies and in a state of excitement that made him solicitously merry during the meal. At dinner he usually called for a bottle of wine, and, as his eyes fastened themselves upon the glass into which the wine bubbled as the negro tilted the bottle he had bound in a napkin, he said to her:
And as she looked at him inquiringly, he said:
"After all, it's worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live."
It was in one of these moods that he consented to make the trip over to Arlington, and Emily, who had already matured a feminine plot of reviving, thereby, some of the emotions of their wedding journey, felt a new resilience in her spirits that verified at last all the hopes she had held out to her heart for this sojourn in the Capital with her husband.
It was a warm afternoon, and the sun shone down with a cruel suggestion of spring--cruel, because one must instantly remember that it was only December, and that the winter lay all before. They took their luncheon that day in the Senate restaurant and Emily assured Jerome that she had never enjoyed any luncheon so much in her life. She was tempted in the spirit of holiday that was upon them, to drink some of the wine Jerome said they must have to make the repast perfect, but her conscience, or her sense of responsibility as the keeper of Jerome's conscience, would not let her. As they sat there over their oysters, Emily was happier than she had been for months, and she looked proudly across the table at Jerome and compared him to the distinguished men he was constantly pointing out--senators with whose names she had long been familiar, whose faces she had so often seen in the newspapers. There was a species of reassurance in her immediate observation that they were, after all, very human men, who, despite the partisan bitterness they could not conceal behind the euphemisms senatorial courtesy moved them to employ in their contributions to the _Congressional Record_, nevertheless foregathered companionably, Republicans and Democrats, and even Populists, and joked and laughed like common brotherly men. The little bell that was always jingling them away to roll-calls up in the Senate chamber, snatching them, as it were, from their lobsters and salads, or, in the cases of the older and hence more dyspeptic statesmen, their bread and milk, just as they were being served, filled that little room in the basement with a fine excitement, which reflected its warmth in her glowing cheeks, and sent its exhilaration coursing through her veins as happily as if she had consented to drink the wine Jerome still urged upon her.