Before many days she was in Washington. It was rainy and cold. She found very little that was inspiring. Her room was cheerless, though she does not say so, but the little touches which she gave to it, as recorded, show how bare and comfortless it must have been. Her salary at the Patent Office continued, but it now becomes apparent that the arrangement whereby the other women in the Patent Office were to do her work had not continued indefinitely. She was hiring a partially disabled man to do her writing and was dividing her salary with him. Out of the balance she paid the rent of her room, eighty-four dollars a year, payable a year in advance. It was not exorbitant rent considering the demand for space in Washington. But it was a cheerless place, and she did not occupy it much. Principally, it was a storehouse for her supplies, with a place partitioned off for her own bedroom. She had many callers, however, Senator Wilson coming to see her frequently, and aiding her in every possible way. More than once she gave him information which he, as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs of the United States Senate, utilized with far-reaching results. Sometimes she told him in the most uncompromising manner of what she regarded as abuses which she had witnessed. There were times when men seemed to her very cowardly, and the Government machinery very clumsy and ineffective. On the evening of April 13, 1864, she was fairly well disgusted with all mankind. She thus wrote her opinion of the human race, referring particularly to the masculine part of it: I am thinking very busily about the result of the investigation into the Florida matter. Is General Seymour to be sacrificed when so many hundred people and the _men_ know it to be all based on falsehood and wrong? Is there no manly justice in the world? Is there not one among them all that _dares_ risk the little of military station he may possess to come out and speak the truth, and do the right? Oh, pity! O Lord, what is man that thou art mindful of him! The next day was not a cheerful day for her. She was still brooding on some of these same matters. She tried in those days to escape from these unhappy reflections by going where she would be compelled to think of something else. But not even in church could she always keep her mind off of them. She wrote at length in her diary on the morning of the 14th, and that evening, when Senator Wilson called, she told him what she thought of the United States Army, the United States Senate, and of people and things in general: