five o'clock
Perhaps the human interest of politics was after all what really attracted her , and , however strongly she might deny it , the passion for exercising power , for its own sake , might dazzle and mislead a woman who had exhausted all the ordinary feminine resources . But why speculate about her motives ? The stage was before her , the curtain was rising , the actors were ready to enter ; she had only to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and see how the play was acted and the stage effects were produced ; how the great tragedians mouthed , and the stage-manager swore . ON the first of December , Mrs. Lee took the train for Washington , and before five o'clock that evening she was entering her newly hired house on Lafayette Square . She shrugged her shoulders with a mingled expression of contempt and grief at the curious barbarism of the curtains and the wall-papers , and her next two days were occupied with a life-and-death struggle to get the mastery over her surroundings . In this awful contest the interior of the doomed house suffered as though a demon were in it ; not a chair , not a mirror , not a carpet , was left untouched , and in the midst of the worst confusion the new mistress sat , calm as the statue of Andrew Jackson in the square under her eyes , and issued her orders with as much decision as that hero had ever shown . Towards the close of the second day , victory crowned her forehead .