intelligent woman." Arbuthnot and Richard burst into the laughter which was always her applause upon such occasions. "You!" commented Arbuthnot. "You are Herodias' daughter, dancing for the head of John the Baptist. You are always dancing in a quiet and effective way for somebody's head. Whose would you like next? How does mine strike you?" "Thank you," said Bertha. "Would you really give it to me if I danced for you in my ablest manner; and how do you think it would look on a charger?" There was more than one hard-worked politician who, after a day of exciting debate or wearisome battling with windmills, found relief and entertainment in the pretty parlors. Some of those who came had known Bertha in her girlhood and were friends of her father, and with these it was the fashion to encourage her to political argument, and affect the deepest confidence in her statements, with a view to drawing forth all her resources. These resources were varied and numerous, and marked by a charming feminine daring and superiority to ordinary logic which were the delights of the senatorial mind. "Why should I endeavor to convince you by being logical?" she said. "You have logic--at least we hope so--all day, and sometimes all night, in the Senate and the House, and even then you are not convinced of things. It is not logic which governs you, but a majority. And that is what one should aspire to, after all,--not to be in the right, but to be in the majority. And I am sure one's arguments are much more untrammelled and brilliant for being illogical. And if I convince you without logic, I win a victory worth having. It is like the triumph of an ugly woman who is called a beauty. If I am pretty and you say so, it is simply as if you said, 'white is white, blackness is dark'; but if I am not pretty, and am ingenious enough to persuade you that I am--there is a triumph to be proud of!" It was nonsense, but it was often sparkling nonsense, whose very lightness was its charm, and the rooms were rarely ever so gay and full of laughter as when there was among the guests a sprinkling of men no longer young, who had come there to forget that they were jaded, or secretly anxious, or bitterly disappointed.