“Would you, Lizzie?” Mary was eager with relief. “I’ll send you in a carriage and a boy with you. I have to make a list. I think we’ll forget the socks—there might not be any and anyway their mothers ought to knit socks for them. We wouldn’t know sizes anyway.” Mary fluttered, hunting pen and paper, sending a maid to order the carriage, getting out a heavy cape of her own to keep the sewing woman warm. “You go down to the market, Lizzie, away down on D Street. Things will be cheaper there. There are thirty-three of those men. Just so each one had some little remembrance the President will be satisfied.” She was grateful not to have to brave again the streets of Washington that were becoming more horrible every day. Deep mud, which Army wagons were churning up, caissons pounding by, cavalry splashing everybody, and soldiers crowding everywhere. The shops were always crowded with the impatient, pushing military and Negroes, and more colored people were thronging into the capital every day, homeless and bewildered. Some of the Negro men were being integrated into the Army but most were a problem that the provosts and police were coping with in desperate confusion. It all made for discomfort and danger. No real indignity had as yet been offered to her personally since those grim days in New York in July, when she had been hooted in the streets and followed into a shop by a jeering mob of ruffians. Here in Washington her greatest cross was the thinly veiled contempt of the women, formerly socially important, the women the President called “those Secesh dames.” Very boldly they let it be known that their sympathies were with the South. Washington, Mr. Seward said, and Mr. Stanton agreed with him, was a nest of spies. In spite of imprisonment, grim guards, and ceaseless precautions, messages still went through the lines to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It was said that Fontaine Maury, the Confederate admiral, had a direct pipeline into the very heart of the Capitol. Suspicion and distrust were rampant, and Mary harbored a constant, nervous fear that either she or Tad might be kidnapped by the Rebels and held as hostages. She had wondered sometimes in moments of private bitterness just how much Abraham Lincoln would surrender to get his wife back, but Tad was the key to his heart. Lately Company K had had orders to keep close surveillance over the boy but Tad was quick and mobile as a flea. Less than a month before he had been brought back, shouting protests and struggling, from climbing the scaffolding of the half-finished Washington Monument.