The mere thought of beginning life again in
Mount Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This is
a story of education -- not a mere lesson of life -- and, with
education, temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although
in practice they run close together. Neither by temperament nor
by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted far away
and behind his companions there; no one trusted his temperament
or education; he had to go.
Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the
shortest road to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside
the social pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced
one's self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of
deplorably bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances
of ending in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the
greater in Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what
to do when he got there. That he must educate himself over again,
for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old
educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do it --
how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist
of the Capital -- he had not an idea, and no one to teach him.
The question of money is rarely serious for a young American
unless he is married, and money never troubled Adams more than
others; not because he had it, but because he could do without
it, like most people in Washington who all lived on the income of
bricklayers; but with or without money he met the difficulty
that, after getting to Washington in order to go on the press, it
was necessary to seek a press to go on.
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