She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If you had, you would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly prude.” An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance, anyone who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house would have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face to face with Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her. Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past, I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences; how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then. Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them, but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools. Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.” From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate House and Senate.