It was because of his liking for both Blaine and Conkling that Grant strove, as his last act in the White House, to reconcile the two men, who were intensely hostile to each other. Their quarrel had grown out of a passage in debate when Conkling had made some very sarcastic comments on Blaine. The latter retorted in kind. “The contempt of that large-minded gentleman,” said he, glancing toward Conkling, “is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut have been so crushing to myself and all the members of this House, that I know it was an act of temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him.” Referring to a recent newspaper article in which Conkling had been likened to the late Henry Winter Davis, Blaine went on: “The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, a dunghill to a diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion!” Conkling never forgave this attack. It seems like a small thing to change the whole current of a nation’s history, but it probably cost Blaine the Presidency; for in 1884 the disaffection of the Republicans in Conkling’s old home in central New York gave the State to Cleveland. President Grant’s effort to bring the foes together failed because Blaine, though ready to make any ordinary concessions, balked when Conkling demanded that he should confess his “mud to marble” speech to have been “unqualifiedly and maliciously false.” In 1874, Miss Nellie Grant was married to Algernon Sartoris, a British subject. She was her father’s pet. At her wedding, he stood beside his wife to receive the guests, his face wearing a sphinx-like calm, though every one knew how he would feel the parting soon to follow. His forced composure continued till Nellie had left the house with her husband, and then he disappeared. An old friend, seeking him up-stairs, tapped at his chamber door, and, as there was no response, pushed it slightly ajar and looked in. There, on the bed, face downward, his eyes buried in his hands and his whole frame shaken with grief, lay the great soldier, sobbing like a child.