practicable; she was aware of hunger clashing with brandy in her stomach, and of a certain weariness this man even in his splendor and susceptibility inspired. He lacked true masculine spontaneity, that possibility of cruelty which brings the final alertness, the last voluptuous rounding, to feminine interest. “Well,” she said in a flattened tone of conclusion and provisional withdrawal, “there are many Christian women, of sound and regular views, who would welcome your attentions, Mr. Buchanan, and throw asoothing light upon the matter of your election.” Having so long waxed flirtatious, she relaxed into theological admonition, continuing, “I fear you vex with your mind what only spirit can decide. You must not bargain with God, as you do with other men of substance. God is not substantial in this sense. He cannot be bargained with. He allows us freedom only to accept or reject Him. Accept Him, sir, simply, without cavil, as a woman does—a woman, of course, of sound disposition and normal attitude.”
Before this insinuation at Ann Coleman could quite register, another sound woman, stout and dutiful Mary Jenkins, appeared; the golden minutes had fled by,
the evening dinner hour was at hand. Despite her profuse invitations Buchanan desisted from partaking
. He reclaimed his beaver hat and the dove-gray gloves folded within it, stood erect with a creak of his travelled knees, and informed the vision in silk—who wore in his sight yet some aspect of a foe, a combatant in the implicative battles of sexual negotiation—“I will strive to accept your advice, Miss Hubley. This chance encounter has been not merely pleasurable but instructive. Shall it occur again, I wonder?”
“If the Lord wills,” she said prettily, confident that it would.
But it did not; events whirled the possibility away. If Grace Hubley is viewed, under a loving but stern Providence, as the source of Buchanan’s impending misfortune, and of a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war, then she deserved to be punished. Not only did she live unwed but she died violently, in utmost pain.
As she grew older in life, and thrice had broken engagements that would have brought her respected husbands, she devoted most of her energies to the entertainment of her friends, many of whom were as light-hearted and blithe as she, too, hadbeen. It was on the return from chaperoning a party of young people from the historic old hotel at Wabank that she met her death. Standing with her back to an open-grate fire, in an unsuspecting moment a spark lit upon her dress, and before help could be called she was seared most terribly over the body and died in pitiful agony in a few hours
. The date, thanks to a tombstone, is known: November 19, 1861. The Union disasters at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff were already history; her death was a match-flare within a spreading conflagration. But surely Grace Hubley did not, after Buchanan
desisted from partaking of dinner with the Jenkins family, and hurriedly departed to his home, where he enjoyed his own solitary meal and performed his toilet for his appointment that evening with his fiancée
, execute the melodramatic perfidy described:
Hardly had he left the Jenkins house, when Miss Hubley slipped to her boudoir and hastily penned a note to Miss Coleman that was “the most unkindest cut of all” to the delicate, sensitive nature of the woman who received it. It was short and concise, telling that Mr. Buchanan had stopped at the Jenkins home to see her and “that they had spent a very pleasant afternoon together.”
Nay, rather than believe such outright and useless malice one would cling to the muffled but musical sentence with which George Ticknor Curtis disposed of the scandal in his authorized (by Buchanan’s younger brother Edward and his niece Harriet Lane Johnston)
Life
of 1883:
It is now known that the separation of the lovers originated in a
Before this insinuation at Ann Coleman could quite register, another sound woman, stout and dutiful Mary Jenkins, appeared; the golden minutes had fled by,
the evening dinner hour was at hand. Despite her profuse invitations Buchanan desisted from partaking
. He reclaimed his beaver hat and the dove-gray gloves folded within it, stood erect with a creak of his travelled knees, and informed the vision in silk—who wore in his sight yet some aspect of a foe, a combatant in the implicative battles of sexual negotiation—“I will strive to accept your advice, Miss Hubley. This chance encounter has been not merely pleasurable but instructive. Shall it occur again, I wonder?”
“If the Lord wills,” she said prettily, confident that it would.
But it did not; events whirled the possibility away. If Grace Hubley is viewed, under a loving but stern Providence, as the source of Buchanan’s impending misfortune, and of a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war, then she deserved to be punished. Not only did she live unwed but she died violently, in utmost pain.
As she grew older in life, and thrice had broken engagements that would have brought her respected husbands, she devoted most of her energies to the entertainment of her friends, many of whom were as light-hearted and blithe as she, too, hadbeen. It was on the return from chaperoning a party of young people from the historic old hotel at Wabank that she met her death. Standing with her back to an open-grate fire, in an unsuspecting moment a spark lit upon her dress, and before help could be called she was seared most terribly over the body and died in pitiful agony in a few hours
. The date, thanks to a tombstone, is known: November 19, 1861. The Union disasters at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff were already history; her death was a match-flare within a spreading conflagration. But surely Grace Hubley did not, after Buchanan
desisted from partaking of dinner with the Jenkins family, and hurriedly departed to his home, where he enjoyed his own solitary meal and performed his toilet for his appointment that evening with his fiancée
, execute the melodramatic perfidy described:
Hardly had he left the Jenkins house, when Miss Hubley slipped to her boudoir and hastily penned a note to Miss Coleman that was “the most unkindest cut of all” to the delicate, sensitive nature of the woman who received it. It was short and concise, telling that Mr. Buchanan had stopped at the Jenkins home to see her and “that they had spent a very pleasant afternoon together.”
Nay, rather than believe such outright and useless malice one would cling to the muffled but musical sentence with which George Ticknor Curtis disposed of the scandal in his authorized (by Buchanan’s younger brother Edward and his niece Harriet Lane Johnston)
Life
of 1883:
It is now known that the separation of the lovers originated in a
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