“I don’t think it.  I can’t think it.  But don’t let us talk about it.  We, at least, are as much friends as though Jack and I were under one flag, and if it depends on me it shall be always so.”

“If it depends on us, it shall never be otherwise.”  She gave the young man a kind, scrutinizing glance, which made his heart beat joyously and his handsome cheeks mount color.  At Fairfax Court-House they said farewell, the ladies continuing the journey in an ambulance under Federal guard.

They passed over the long bridge three days after the famous night at Rosedale, of whose exciting sequel they were profoundly ignorant.  In her husband’s time Mrs. Sprague had lived in hotels in the capital, as the sessions were short; she had never remained in the city when the warm weather set in, no matter how long the term lasted.  But on her arrival at the old hotel now, she was a good deal disturbed to learn that she could not be accommodated in her former quarters.  The military crowded not only this but every hotel in the city, and it was only after long search that a habitable apartment was found in Georgetown.  On the whole, the necessity that drove her thither was not an unmitigated adversity, for Georgetown then was far more desirable for residence than Washington.  Nothing could be more depressing than the city at that epoch.  Every visible object in the vast circumference of its spreading limits was then naked unkempt.  Even the trees, that ranged themselves irregularly in the straggling squares and wide street areas, stretched out a draggled and piebald plumage, as if uncertain whether beauty or ugliness were their function in the ensemble.

The photographic realism of the later newspaper correspondent had not come into play in these earlier years of the war, and, as a consequence, the thousands who poured down to the Army of the Potomac beheld the city with something of the incredulous scorn with which the effeminate Byzantines regarded the capital of the Goths, when the corrupt descendant of Constantine made the savage Dacians his allies, rather than fight them.  Patriotism, however, not pride, marked the common mold of the men of the civil war.  It may have been that many an honest plowman, marching through the muddy quagmires of Pennsylvania Avenue, bethought himself that such a capital was hardly worth while marching so far to protect—­more emphatically so when the enemy was really to be found on lines far north of it!  Sentiment is the heart and soul of war; if it were not, there would be no war, for war never gained as much as it loses; never settled as much as it unsettles; never left victor or vanquished better when the last gun was fired!  In old times the capture of a nation’s capital meant the end of the war, but we have seen capitals captured and the war not modified a bit by it.  Washington was seized and burned by the British in 1814, and the war went on; Paris was held by the Germans for half a year, and the war went on.