No one else either looked
it, or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young
Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of
his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He saw Mr.
Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural
Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He
saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind,
absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid
gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any
other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of
becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a
private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have
thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much
education as the new President but that all the education he
could get would not be enough.
As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in
March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who
knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, but all the
education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one man in
Adams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowledge and
experience to be an adviser and friend.
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