Mrs. Croix, quite forgotten, leaned back in her chair, a smile succeeding the puzzled annoyance of her eyes.  In this house her words were the jewels for which this courtly company scrambled, but Hamilton had not been met abroad for weeks, and from him there was always something to learn; whereas from even the most brilliant of women—­she shrugged her shoulders; and her eyes, as they dwelt on Hamilton, gradually filled with an expression of idolatrous pride.  The new delight of self-effacement was one of the keenest she had known.

The bombardment continued.  The Vice-President?  Whom should Hamilton support?  Adams?  Hancock?  Was it true that there was a schism in the Federal party that might give the anti-Federalists, with Clinton at their head, a chance for the Vice-Presidency at least?  Who would be Washington’s advisers besides himself?  Would the President have a cabinet?  Would Congress sanction it?  Whom should he want as confreres, and whom in the Senate to further his plans?  Whom did he favour as Senators and Representatives from New York?  Could this rage for amendments be stopped?  What was to be the fate of the circular letter?  Was all danger of a new Constitutional Convention well over?  What about the future site of the Capital—­would the North get it, or the South?

All these, the raging questions of the day, it took Hamilton the greater part of the evening to answer or parry, but he deftly altered his orbit until he stood beside Mrs. Croix, the company before her shrine.  He had encountered her eyes, but although he knew the supreme surrender of women in the first stages of passion, he also understood the vanities and weaknesses of human nature too well not to apprehend a chill of the affections under too prolonged a mortification.

Clinton entered at midnight; and after almost bending his gouty knee to the hostess, whom he had never seen in such softened yet dazzling beauty, he measured Hamilton for a moment, then laughed and held out his hand.

“You are a wonderful fighter,” he said, “and you beat me squarely.  We’ll meet in open combat again and again, no doubt of it, and I hope we will, for you rouse all my mettle; but I like you, sir, I like you.  I can’t help it.”

Hamilton, at that time of his life the most placable of men, had shaken his hand heartily.  “And I so esteem and admire you, sir,” he answered warmly, “that I would I could convert you, for your doctrines are bound to plunge this country into civil war sooner or later.  The Constitution has given the States just four times more power than is safe in their hands; but if we could establish a tradition at this early stage of the country’s history that it was the duty of the States always to consider the Union first and themselves as grateful assistants to a hard-working and paternal central power, we might do much to counteract an evil which, if coddled, is bound to result in a trial of strength.”