But on this December morning, the fog obscured the Capitol, and though Emily's eye ranged everywhere, she could not find it. Jerome had nodded to one of the hackmen who thrust their whips at him in menacing invitation, and as he turned to assist Emily, he knew what she was looking for. So with the pleased superiority of one who has grown familiar with noted sights, Garwood pierced the gloom, and then, like a sailor sighting land, he pointed and said: "There; there it is. See it?" His little wife bent her head and her brows, while the cabman waited with a sneer, and at last she smiled and sighed an "Ah!" of recognition. For she had descried the massive dome, floating majestically in the gray mists as if it had detached itself from its base and had become a ghost of the fog, of a color and of an immensity with it. As she tried to trace its vague colossal proportions, it seemed to mount higher and higher on the heavy clouds, and there it hung and brooded over the capital of the nation, over the nation itself, and over its destiny. It soared far above the passions and partisanship of the little men who swarmed through its great porticos and in its huge rotunda, and it lifted her soul to lofty conceptions, so that she forgot all else and stood there with her foot on the step of the carriage, while the others, the misanthropic coachman, the hungry and accustomed husband, the heavy-eyed nurse, and the slumbering babe, waited. "Well!" said Garwood at last, and she caught her breath and recalled herself to the earth with a sigh. As they rolled over the asphalt streets, she pressed her face to the rattling panes of the carriage window, but she could find the great dome no more; it had floated away and vanished like a vision out of sight. Emily saw the Capitol at other times. She saw it close at hand, on her way with Garwood across the park that spread its plots between the Capitol and the rising walls of the new congressional library, as she paused to rest a moment near the statue of Washington boxed up for the winter, and looked up, up, up the pillared front of the building to the dome shining in the afternoon sun. She saw it on dark nights, when its rows of little windows blinked out of the black wall of night; she saw it rising calm, pale and majestic in the luminous light of the moon; but it was not in any of these moods that she could remember it thereafter, nor as she had seen it for the first time on her wedding journey, but forevermore it appeared as she had seen it that morning, when her eyes pierced through the mists and caught that one glimpse of its mighty image, a gray specter of the life she once had pictured to herself. They drove to the hotel where Garwood had lived during his first session, and where he still owed a bill, and took the rooms he had arranged for.