Hamilton shrugged his shoulders and made no answer.  He had ceased remonstrance long since.  If it pleased her to think she was fighting the battles he was forced to fight with undiminished vigour himself, he should be the last to interfere with her amusement.  She was a born intrigante, and would have been miserable freckling her complexion in the open sunlight.  He was too grateful to her at this time to risk a quarrel, or to condemn her for any of her violations of masculine standards.  It was to her he poured out his wrath, after an encounter with Jefferson which had roused him too viciously for reaction at Washington’s board or at his own.  His wife he spared in every way.  Not only was her delicate health taxed to the utmost with social duties which could not be avoided, the management of her household affairs, and an absorbing and frequently ailing family, but he would have controlled himself had he burst, before he would have terrified her with a glimpse of passions of whose existence she had not a suspicion.  To her and his family he was ever the most amiable and indulgent of men, giving them every spare moment he could command, and as delighted as a schoolboy with a holiday, when he could spend an hour in the nursery, an evening with his wife, or take a ramble through the woods with his boys.  He took a deep pride in his son Philip, directed his studies and habits, and was as pleased with every evidence of his progress as had he seen Madison riding a rail in a coat of tar and feathers.  He coddled and petted the entire family, particularly his little daughter Angelica, and they adored him, and knew naught of his depths.

But Mrs. Croix knew them.  In her management of Hamilton she made few mistakes, passionately as she loved him.  It was in her secluded presence he stormed himself cool, was indignantly sympathized with first, then advised, then soothed.  He was made to understand that the more he revealed the black and implacable deeps of his nature, the more was he worshipped, the more keen the response from other and not dissimilar deeps.  His wife was necessary to him in many ways, his Egeria in many more.  Although he would have sacrificed the last to the first, had it come to an issue, he would have felt as if one-half of him had been cruelly divorced.  Few women understand this dual nature in men, and few are the men who do not.  It has been known to exist in those who make no pretensions to genius, and in Hamilton was as natural as the versatility of his intellect.  When with one he locked the other in the recesses of his mind as successfully as when at college he had accomplished herculean feats of mental accumulation by keeping but one thing before his thought at a time.  What he wanted he would have, so long as his family were in no way affected; and had it not been for Mrs. Croix at this time, it might have been worse for Betsey.  She cooled his fevers; her counsel was always sound.  And her rooms and herself were beautiful.  She had her way of banishing the world by drawing her soft blue curtains and lighting her many candles.  Had she been a fool, Hamilton would have tired of her in a month; as it was, he often thought of her as the most confidential and dispensing of his friends, and no more.