# The Clansman (1905)/Book 2/Chapter 10

AS the storm of passion raised by the clash between her father and the President rose steadily to the sweep of a cyclone, Elsie felt her own life but a leaf driven before its fury.
Her only comfort she found in Phil, whose letters to her were full of love for Margaret. He asked Elsie a thousand foolish questions about what she thought of his chances.
To her own confessions he was all sympathy.
"Of father's wild scheme of vengeance against the South," he wrote, "I am heart-sick. I hate it on principle, to say nothing of a girl I know. I am with General Grant for peace and reconciliation. What does your lover think of it all? I can feel your anguish. The bill to rob the Southern people of their land, which I hear is pending, would send your sweetheart and mine, our enemies, into beggared exile. What will happen in the South? Riot and bloodshed, of course—perhaps a guerilla war of such fierce and terrible cruelty humanity sickens at the thought. I fear the Rebellion unhinged our father's reason on some things. He was too old to go to the front. The cannon's breath would have cleared the air and sweetened his temper. But its healing was denied. I believe ​the tawny leopardess who keeps his house influences him in this cruel madness. I could wring her neck with exquisite pleasure. Why he allows her to stay and cloud his life with her she-devil temper and fog his name with vulgar gossip is beyond me."
Seated in the park on the Capitol hill the day after her father had introduced his Confiscation Bill in the House, pending the impeachment of the President, she again attempted to draw Ben out as to his feelings on politics.
She waited in sickening fear and bristling pride for the first burst of his anger which would mean their separation.
"How do I feel?" he asked. "Don't feel at all. The surrender of General Lee was an event so stunning, my mind has not yet staggered past it. Nothing much can happen after that, so it don't matter."
"Negro suffrage don't matter?"
"No. We can manage the Negro," he said, calmly.
"With thousands of your own people disfranchised?"
"The negroes will vote with us, as they worked for us during the war. If they give them the ballot, they'll wish they hadn't."
Ben looked at her tenderly, bent near, and whispered:
"Don't waste your sweet breath talking about such things. My politics is bounded on the North by a pair of amber eyes, on the South by a dimpled little chin, on the East and West by a rosy cheek. Words do not frame its speech. Its language is a mere sign, a pressure of the lips—yet it thrills body and soul beyond all words."
Elsie leaned closer, and looking at the Capitol, said wistfully:
​"I don't believe you know anything that goes on in that big marble building."
"Yes, I do."
"What happened there yesterday?"
"You honoured it by putting your beautiful feet on its steps. I saw the whole huge pile of cold marble suddenly glow with warm sunlight and flash with beauty as you entered it."
The girl nestled still closer to his side, feeling her utter helplessness in the rapids of the Niagara through which they were being whirled by blind and merciless forces. For the moment she forgot all fears in his nearness and the sweet pressure of his hand.