The appearance and conduct of these women during the day interested Sylvia almost as much as the incidents occurring on the floor; it was a new idea that politics had a bearing upon the domestic life of the men who engaged in the eternal contest for place and power.
The convention as a spectacle was immensely diverting, but she had her misgivings about it as a transaction in history.

Colonel Ramsay asked her politics and she confessed that she had none.

She had inherited Republican prejudices from her grandfather, and most of the girls she had known in college were of Republican antecedents; but she liked to call herself an independent.
"You'd better not be a Democrat, Sylvia," Mrs.Owen warned her.

"I suffered a good deal in my husband's lifetime from being one.

There are still people in this town who think a Democrat's the same as a Rebel or a Copperhead.