Jefferson began a tentative showing of his colours while the bill was fighting its stormy way through Congress, and Hamilton was a brief while perceiving his drift and appreciating his implacable enmity.  The first time that Jefferson encountered the lightning in Hamilton’s eye, the quivering of his nostril, as he half rose from his chair under the sudden recognition of what he was to expect, his legs slid forward limply, and he turned his head toward the door.  Washington suppressed a smile, but it was long before he smiled again, Hamilton would have no hints and innuendoes; he forced his enemy to show his hand.  But although he wrung from Jefferson his opposition to the Bank and to every scheme the Secretary of the Treasury had proposed, he could not drag him into the open.  Jefferson was deprecating, politely determined to serve the country in his own way, lost in admiration of this opponent’s intellect, but forced to admit his mistakes—­the mistakes of a too ardent mind.  The more bitter and caustic the sarcasms that leaped from Hamilton’s tongue, the more suave he grew, for placidity was his only weapon of self-preservation; a war of words with Hamilton, and he would be made ridiculous in the presence of his colleagues and Washington.  Occasionally the volcano flared through his pale eyes, and betrayed such hate and resentment that Washington elevated his hands an inch.  The President sat like a stoic, with a tornado on one side of him and a growling Vesuvius on the other, and exhibited an impartiality, in spite of the fact that Jefferson daily betrayed his hostility to the Administration, which revealed but another of his superhuman attributes.  But there is a psychological manifestation of mental bias, no matter what the control, and some men are sensitive enough to feel it.  Jefferson was quite aware that Washington loved Hamilton and believed in him thoroughly, and he felt the concealed desire to side openly with the Secretary to whom, practically, had been given the reins of government.  Washington, rather than show open favouritism, even to Hamilton, to whom he felt the profoundest gratitude, would have resigned his high office; but the desire was in his head, and Jefferson felt it.  The campaign open, he kept up a nagging siege upon Washington’s convictions in favour of his aggressive Secretary’s measures, finding constant excuses to be alone with the President.  Hamilton, on the other hand, dismissed the subject when left alone with Washington, unless responding to a demand.  He frequently remained to the midday meal with the family, and was as gay and lively as if Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were in the limbo to which he gladly would have consigned them.  His nature was mercurial in one, at least, of its essences, and a sudden let-down, followed by congenial company, restored his equilibrium at once.  But Washington watched the development of the blackness and violence of his deeper passions with uneasiness and regret, finally with alarm.