Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/395

376 and as she was to do the honors of the table I handed her to dinner myself. That Mr. Merry might not construe this as giving them a precedence over Mrs. Merry I have discontinued it, and here as in private houses the pêle mêle practice is adhered to. They have got Yrujo to take a zealous part in the claim of precedence. It has excited generally emotions of great contempt and indignation (in which the members of the Legislature participate sensibly) that the agents of foreign nations should assume to dictate to us what shall be the laws of our society. The consequence will be that Mr. and Mrs. Merry will put themselves into coventry, and that he will lose the best half of his usefulness to his nation,—that derived from a perfectly familiar and private intercourse with the Secretaries and myself. The latter, be assured, is a virago, and in the short course of a few weeks has established a degree of dislike among all classes which one would have thought impossible in so short a time. . . . With respect to Merry, he appears so reasonable and good a man that I should be sorry to lose him as long as there remains a possibility of reclaiming him to the exercise of his own dispositions. If his wife perseveres she must eat her soup at home, and we shall endeavor to draw him into society as if she did not exist."

Of all American hospitality none was so justly famous as that of Virginia. In this State there was probably not a white man, or even a negro slave, but would have resented the charge that he was capable of asking a stranger, a foreigner, a woman, under his roof, with the knowledge that he was about to inflict what the guest would feel as a humiliation. Still less would he have selected his guest's only