Again one went to meditate on the steps of the
Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as
before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no plan or
movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The season
was over before they returned; and when the private secretary sat
down again at his desk in Portland Place before a mass of copy in
arrears, he saw before him a world so changed as to be beyond
connection with the past. His identity, if one could call a
bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain;
but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a
spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
attachment.
All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and
hastened to get married and retire into back streets and suburbs
until they could find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going
home "next fall," and when the fall came, he was going home "next
spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew Johnson was
at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things
unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants who had
acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the
members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of
English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to
become a vice.
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