"You manage your belligerents very well," said Senator North, when he shook her hand awhile later. "Yours has probably been the only amiable supper-room in Washington to-night." XII "Now!" exclaimed Sally Carter, who was sobbing hysterically, "I hope they will impeach the President if he delays any longer with the _Maine_ report and if he doesn't send a warlike message on top of it. After that speech I don't see why Congress should wait for him at all." It was the seventeenth of March, and she and Betty were driving home from the Capitol after listening to the Senator from Vermont on the situation in Cuba,--to that cold, bare, sober statement of the result of personal investigation, which produced a far deeper and more historical impression than all the impassioned rhetoric which had rent the air since the agitation began. He appeared to have no feeling on the matter, no personal bias; he told what he had seen, and he had seen misery, starvation, and wholesale death. He blamed the Spaniards no more than the insurgents, but two hundred thousand people were the victims of both; and the bold yet careful etching he made of the Cuban drama burnt itself into the brains of the forty-six Senators present and of the eight hundred people in the galleries. "I cannot bring myself to think that death is the worst of all evils," said Betty, "and I do not think that we have any right to go to war with Spain, no matter what she chooses to do with her own. Besides, she is thoroughly frightened now, and I believe would rectify her mistakes in an even greater measure than she has already tried to do, if the President were given time to handle her with tact and diplomacy. If the country would give him a chance to save her pride, war could be averted." "You are heartless! Don't argue with me. I hate argument when my emotions feel as if they had dynamite in them. I could sit down on the floor of the Senate and scream until war was declared. I hate Senator North. He never moved a muscle of his face during that entire terrible recital. He hardly looked interested. He is a heartless brute." "He is not heartless. He fears everlasting complications if we go to war with Spain, the expenditure of hundreds of millions, as one result of those complications, and danger to the Constitution. The statesman thinks of his own country first--" "I won't listen! I won't! I won't! Oh, I never thought I could get so excited about anything. I believe I'm going to have nervous prostration and I sha'n't see you again till war is declared. So there!" The carriage stopped at her house, and she jumped out and ran up the steps. She kept her word, and it was weeks before Betty saw her to speak to again.