Mrs.Clinton never said anything of the sort." "Mrs.Marston says it is because you have caught a ra-ra-rat, and Senator Clinton was only a m-m-mouse!" Naturally all this unexpected publicity irritated Mrs.Lee not a little, especially when short and vague paragraphs, soon followed by longer and more positive ones, in regard to Senator Ratcliffe's matrimonial prospects, began to appear in newspapers, along with descriptions of herself from the pens of enterprising female correspondents for the press, who had never so much as seen her.

At the first sight of one of these newspaper articles, Madeleine fairly cried with mortification and anger.

She wanted to leave Washington the next day, and she hated the very thought of Ratcliffe.

There was something in the newspaper style so inscrutably vulgar, something so inexplicably revolting to the sense of feminine decency, that she shrank under it as though it were a poisonous spider.

But after the first acute shame had passed, her temper was roused, and she vowed that she would pursue her own path just as she had begun, without regard to all the malignity and vulgarity in the wide United States.