Perhaps it was part of the
inconsistency of her sex that she was pierced with the bullets of those
she had loved, and was wearing the garments of the race that she had
wronged.
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
It was sunset of a hot day at Washington. Even at that hour the broad
avenues, which diverged from the Capitol like the rays of another sun,
were fierce and glittering. The sterile distances between glowed
more cruelly than ever, and pedestrians, keeping in the scant shade,
hesitated on the curbstones before plunging into the Sahara-like
waste of crossings. The city seemed deserted. Even that vast army of
contractors, speculators, place-hunters, and lobbyists, which hung on
the heels of the other army, and had turned this pacific camp of the
nation into a battlefield of ignoble conflict and contention--more
disastrous than the one to the South--had slunk into their holes in
hotel back bedrooms, in shady barrooms, or in the negro quarters of
Georgetown, as if the majestic, white-robed Goddess enthroned upon the
dome of the Capitol had at last descended among them and was smiting to
right and left with the flat and flash of her insufferable sword.
Into this stifling atmosphere of greed and corruption Clarence Brant
stepped from the shadow of the War Department.
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