When Miss Lane returned to her uncle, it was not to parade her trouble, but quietly and cheerfully to assist him in his social and domestic life; to keep her grief for her closet, and in the endurance of it, to ask no help but God’s. Yet all who saw her, subdued but dignified, as she received familiar friends during those first months in Washington, were struck with the elegant repose of her manners, her sweet thanks for sympathy, and her kind and gentle interest in everything about her. The next winter she went to no entertainments, but the usual dinners and receptions at home were not omitted. In her new high sphere she was as much admired as she had always been, and after she began to participate in the gayeties of that gayest administration, her life was made up of a series of honors and pleasures such as have never fallen to the lot of any other young lady in the United States. On the occasion of a New Year’s reception, when Mr. Buchanan stood up to receive the ambassadors of the world’s kingdoms and empires, his great frame, his massive head, his noble countenance, marked and adorned by the lines of thought, but untouched by the wrinkles of decay, made him a spectacle so impressive and majestic, that it did not require the addition of his courtly manners to elicit a thrill of pride in the breast of every American who beheld him. It would have been a trying contrast to the beauty and dignity of any one to have stood by his side; yet it was difficult for those who saw Harriet Lane there to decide between the uncle and the niece—to say which looked the proudest and the greatest—the man or the woman, the earlier or the later born. Miss Lane’s position was more onerous and more crowded with social duties than that of any other person who had filled her place since the days of Martha Washington, because Mr. Buchanan received not merely official visits in the capacity of President, but his wide acquaintance at home and abroad was the cause of his constantly entertaining, as a private gentleman, foreigners and others, who came, not to see Washington and the President, but to visit Mr. Buchanan himself. Jefferson Davis, who, for reasons creditable to Mr. Buchanan’s course at the outbreak of the secession movement, was not friendly to him, speaking to Dr. Craven at Fortress Monroe, said: “The White House, under the administration of Buchanan, approached more nearly to my idea of a Republican Court than the President’s house had ever done before since the days of Washington.” In this compliment, extorted by truth, of course Miss Lane shared.