Troup groaned.  “You have so many sides to satisfy!  Would that you could have your truly phenomenal versatility of mind with a sweet simplicity of character.  But we are not in the millennium.  And as you have not the customary failings of genius,—­ingratitude, morbidity, a disposition to prevaricate, a lack of common-sense, selfishness, and irresponsibility,—­it is easy for us to forgive you the one inevitable weakness.  Come to me if you get into trouble.  She’d have no mercy at my hands.  I’d wring her neck.”

Many people were at their country-seats, but politics kept a number of men in town, and for this political and wholly masculine salon of Mrs. Croix, Gouverneur Morris drove down from Morrisania, Robert Livingston from Clermont; Governor Clinton had made it convenient to remain a day longer in New York.  Dr. Franklin had been a guest of my lady for the past two days.  They were all, with the exception of Clinton, in the drawing-room, when Hamilton, Steuben and Fish arrived; and several of the Crugers, Colonel Duer, General Knox, Mayor Duane, Melancthon Smith, Mr. Watts, Yates, Lansing, and a half-dozen lesser lights.  Mrs. Croix sat in the middle of the room, and her chair being somewhat higher and more elaborate than its companions, suggested a throne:  Madame de Stael set the fashion in many affectations which were not long travelling to America.  In the house, Mrs. Croix discarded the hoopskirt, and the classic folds of her soft muslin gown revealed a figure as superb in contour as it was majestic in carriage.  Her glittering hair was in a tower, and the long oval of her face gave to this monstrous head-dress an air of proportion.  Her brows and lashes were black, her eyes the deepest violet that ever man had sung, childlike when widely opened, but infinitely various with a drooping lash.  The nose was small and aquiline, fine and firm, the nostril thin and haughty.  The curves of her mouth included a short upper lip, a full under one, and a bend at the corners.  There was a deep cleft in the chin.  Technically her hair was auburn; when the sun flooded it her admirers vowed they counted twenty shades of red, yellow, sorrel, russet, and gold.  Even under the soft rays of the candles it was crisp with light and colour.  The dazzling skin and soft contours hid a jaw that denoted both strength and appetite, and her sweet gracious manner gave little indication of her imperious will, independent mind, and arrogant intellect.  She looked to be twenty-eight, but was reputed to have been born in 1769.  For women so endowed years have little meaning.  They are born with what millions of their sex never acquire, a few with the aid of time and experience only.  Nature had fondly and diabolically equipped her to conquer the world, to be one of its successes; and so she was to the last of her ninety-six years.  Her subsequent career was as brilliant in Europe as it had been, and was to be again, in America.  In Paris, Lafayette