Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/303



Drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle, and during this last decade everyone talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siecle, where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him. Of the society favorites who made the life of every dinner-table and of the halls of Congress,—Tom Reed, Burke Cockran, Edw. Wolcott,—he knew not one. Although Calvin Brice was his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Elaine or Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality with out returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.