They drove to the hotel where Garwood had lived during his first session, and where he still owed a bill, and took the rooms he had arranged for.
In the flush of his reëlection he had insisted upon his wife's going to Washington with him for the short session, and without much difficulty she had induced her father to consent to her departure. He had said he could get along without her during the three months the session would last, though the lengthened tone in which he drawled out the names of the three months, December, January and February, told of a prospect before him as long and dark as the winter itself. She had silenced the qualms she had felt by wringing from him half a promise to come on to Washington himself in February; he might, she insisted, anticipate the spring that way. And when her duty to her father seemed drawing her away from her resolution, she dwelt inwardly on her duty to her husband. She had thought through the long hours of wakeful nights of her separations from him; she had counted with a gasp of sudden fright the days into which those separations lengthened, and she had resolved that nevermore in the future would she let him be so long away without her. She had buttressed her soul in that regard on certain sage words of her Mother Garwood, who had shaken her head and said:
"It ain't good, it ain't good, Em'ly, fer young husban's to be away too much from their wives. It never was intended; no, it never was intended," she repeated, shaking her head with the satisfaction she found in her knowledge of the will of God in His personal dealings with His creatures on this earth, and her words had impressed Emily as if they were indeed a revelation.
During their first few days in Washington, it rained continually, and she stayed indoors, save for a trip down the street as far as the Treasury building, around which she walked in a little spirit of adventure, taking her eyes from its portico long enough to gaze down the wide sweep of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Capitol rising at its end. And then she hurried back to the baby.
Garwood was too much occupied with what he called duties connected with the opening of Congress to be much with her. On the day the Congress convened he took her with him and left her in the gallery to look down on the assembling members, and she found her keenest interest in following him about as he moved to his seat, and in watching the members pause to shake his hand and to smile, and to join their laugh with his, so that she knew they were congratulating each other upon reëlection.