Betty had been in the gallery all night and a part of the preceding day. When the Senate took a recess at half-past six in the evening, she and Mary Montgomery, while Mrs. Shattuc guarded their seats, had forced their way down to the restaurant, but had been obliged to content themselves with a few sandwiches bought at the counter. But Betty was conscious of neither hunger nor fatigue, although the strain during the last eight hours had been almost insupportable: the brief sharp debates, the prosing of bores, interrupted by angry cries of "Vote! Vote!" the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators talked constantly in groups except when the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations brought in his amended bill;--all this had made up a day trying to the stoutest nerves, and more than one person had fainted and been carried from the galleries. The blood throbbed in Betty Madison's head from repressed excitement and the long strain on her nerves. But the solemnity of the scene affected her so powerfully that her ego seemed dead, she only was conscious of looking down upon history. It seemed to her that for the first time she fully realized the tremendous issues involved in the calling of that roll of names. The attitude of the American people which she had deprecated and scorned was dignified by the attitude of that historical body below her. Even Senator North did not interest her. The Senate for the time was a unit. It seemed to her an interminable interval between the last echo of the rumbling voice of the Clerk who had read the resolution amended by the report of the conferees, and the first raucous exasperated note of the Secretary's clerk, after a brief colloquy between Senators. This clerk calls the roll of the Senate at all times as if he hated every member of it, and to-night he was nervous.