Reader, let your mind’s eye wander to the galleries. At the right of the diplomatic seats sits a woman reminding us of an English duchess. She is not delicate or sylph-like; on the contrary, nothing shall be said about avoirdupois. She is elegant and distinguished looking. Her black, flowing drapery is moire antique; a costly camel’s-hair shawl is thrown carelessly back from her shoulders, and lilac plumes dance and flutter with every turn of her head; amethysts and diamonds hang suspended from her ears, and her left hand sparkles with the weight of a moderate fortune. Would you know her title? It is the same whose name flew all over the country in connection with the Prince of Wales at the time the Gothamites feasted the Prince and provided him with a partner also. It will be remembered that on that most important evening the floor fell into the cellar, and there are people of to-day who are no wiser than to say, “No wonder! No wonder!” In the sky of wealth and fashion in Washington, this queenly woman is a flaming star of the first magnitude; or, more properly speaking, she is the Pleiades, Hyades, and possibly the “big dipper” also.
And now, reader, you are to know about the wife of a Senator who is not in her coveted seat to-day, for the reason that she has given to one of her husband’s constituents her ticket, and, therefore, like the humblest amongst us, has to remain at home. Would you know this pure type of womanhood, who says with her own lips, “We owe more to our constituents than to ourselves”? Would you know the woman whose sincere pity goes unchallenged amidst all this frivolity and wickedness, and whose unostentatious charity would be as refreshing and as broadcast as the evening dew if the source of supply was as unfailing as her own generous heart? Scarcely a public institution of charity exists in Washington without her name on the roll call and she alone gathered the first thousand dollars that made the “Newsboys’ Home” a success.
There are holy places in the mosque of the Moslems where only the “faithful” can tread with unsandaled feet, and there are some human lives so purified and exalted that only the pen of the Recording Angel is worthy to transfix their fleeting lights and shadows, their struggles in their upward flight. Ah! reader, would you know why Senator Wilson lies so close to the heart of cold, haughty Massachusetts; why he has the least of this world’s goods of any man in Congress; why he fights so manfully for the poor and down-trodden; why he is one of the most popular and best-beloved men in the land? It is because he is strengthened and solaced and the armor for life’s battle is girded on at home.