She had planned during the long year in which Garwood waited so impatiently for the sitting of Congress to go to Washington with him. They had talked of it all the winter and during the spring. When March came and with its fourth day brought the sense that he was now in reality a congressman, Garwood had felt an increase of importance with an increase of impatience. The coming of his first voucher soon after was a joy to them both, and the four hundred and sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents it called for seemed to link them more firmly to officialdom. But Garwood longed to be sitting in his seat in the House of Representatives; to hear his name in the roll-call; he felt that he would not realize it all until he had been there long enough to have grown familiar, and yet not so long as to begin to dread the end. And Emily felt that her joy would not be full until she had seen him there.
The whole time for her had held other duties, duties of a sacred preparation, when she sat long days in the sunlight, with her eyelids drooped over white garments in her lap. Garwood had never been so tender of her before, and he hung about in a solicitude that betrayed a man's love and a boy's awkwardness. With a woman's superior intuition she was the dominant one in those days, though the coming of the baby late in the fall left her helpless, and restored him suddenly to self-confidence. So, after all, when December came, with its long anticipated first Monday, Emily could not go to Washington with her husband and, bruised by the wrench of their first parting, she was left in the house with her father and her boy to face a long winter alone. All that winter she carefully read the accounts in the newspapers of the proceedings of Congress, and cast her eye each morning down the wide columns of the _Congressional Record_ seeking the magic name "Mr. Garwood."
It was only once or twice that she had the joy of finding Jerome's name, and then what he said seemed formal and distant, and did not have a personal appeal to her. For instance, late in the session, she read:
"Mr. Garwood addressed the Committee of the Whole."
But when they did appear later, weeks later, on the very first page of the _Record_, with the words, "Speech of the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood," in black types at the head, they were long and full of statistics, not at all like the fiery speech he had made that last night of the campaign. She could find no mention of the speech in the daily newspapers, and she had her fears that Jerome was not being appreciated. He had made an effort at first to write to her daily, but soon there were lengthy intervals between the letters, and the letters themselves grew shorter, seeming to have been written late at night, when he was tired and sleepy. But they were always filled with admonitions for the boy, and Emily found joy in translating them into the baby tongue the child understood so well, as she could tell by the big blue eyes and the cooings of his drooling little lips.