Aside from his concerns of law and land, Aaron devotes a deal of thought to little Theodosia--child of his soul’s heart! In his pride, he hurries her into Horace and Terence at the age of ten; and later sends her voyaging to Troy with Homer, and all over the world with Herodotus. Nor is this the whole tale of baby Theodosia’s evil fortunes. She is taught French, music, drawing, dancing, and whatever else may convey a glory and a gloss. Love-led, pride-blinded, Aaron takes up the rôle of father in its most awful form. “Believe me, my dear,” he says to Theodosia mere, who pleads for an educational leniency--“believe me, I shall prove in our darling that women have souls, a psychic fact which high ones have been heard to dispute.” At the age of twelve, the book-burdened little Theodosia translates the Constitution into French at Aaron’s request; at sixteen, she finds celebration as the most learned of her sex since Voltaire’s Emilie. Theodosia mere, however, is spared the spectacle of her baby’s harrowing erudition, for in the middle of Aaron’s term as senator death carries her away. With that loss, Aaron is more and more drawn to baby Theodosia; she becomes his earth, his heaven, and stands for all his tenderest hopes. While she is yet a child, he makes her the head of Richmond Hill, and gives a dinner of state, over which she presides, to the limping Talleyrand, and Volney with his “Ruins of Empire.” For all her precocities, and that hothouse bookishness which should have spoiled her, baby Theodosia blossoms roundly into womanhood--beautiful as brilliant. While Aaron finds little or nothing of public sort to engage him, he does not permit this idleness to shake his hold of politics. Angry with the royalties of Washington, he drifts into near if not intimate relations with the arch-democrat Jefferson. Aaron and the loose-framed secretary are often together; and yet never on terms of confidence or even liking. They are in each other’s society because they go politically the same road. Fellow wayfarers of politics, with “Democracy” their common destination, they are fairly compelled into one another’s company. But there grows up no spirit of comradeship, no mutual sentiment of admiration and trust. Aaron’s feelings toward Jefferson, and the sources of them, find setting forth in a conversation which he holds with his new disciple, Senator Andrew Jackson, who has come on from his wilderness home by the Cumberland. “It is not that I like Jefferson,” he explains, “but that I dislike Washington and Hamilton. Jefferson will make a splendid tool to destroy the others with; I mean to use him as the instrument of my vengeance.” Jefferson, when speaking of Aaron to the wooden Adams, is neither so full nor so frank. The Bay State publicist has again made mention of that impressive ancestry which he thinks is Aaron’s best claim to public as well as private consideration.