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grace in orchestrating his social life. Under her supervision, the parties at the Chase mansion had become legendary. “Probably no woman in American history has had as brilliant a social career,” one journalist observed of Kate. “Even the achievements of Dolly Madison pale into insignificance compared with her successes.” Fanny Seward considered herself lucky to receive an invitation to one of Kate’s parties. “Scarcely a person there whom it was not a pleasure to meet,” she bubbled. “I don’t know whether it was Miss Chase being so charming herself that made the party pass so pleasantly, but I think so sweet a presence must have lent a charm to the whole.”

Unwilling to abandon her role in forwarding Chase’s dreams, Kate persuaded William that they should all reside under the same roof. Approaching her father, she insisted that both she and William desired a united household. Though Chase had undoubtedly longed for this very arrangement, he made a show of reluctantly abandoning his “idea of taking a house or apartment near the Presidents” to suit their wishes. “Life is short and uncertain and I am not willing to do anything which will grieve my children,” he wrote. “So I yield the point.” They agreed that Chase would continue to pay the rent and the servants while William would cover the food and entertainment, assume half the stable expenses, and renovate the house to suit the needs of both a senator and a cabinet official.

Recognizing “the delicate link which has so long united father & daughter,” Sprague wisely decided to “respect and honor” their relationship. “I am not afraid that the tenacious affection of a daughter will detract from that she owes to one she accepts for her life companion,” he wrote Kate. “I am not so silly as not to see & feel that it is a surer garuantee of a more permanent and enduring love.” While he bristled at the discovery that Kate allowed her father to read all of Sprague’s letters to her, he was gratified by the praise his writing drew from the ever critical Chase. “Katie showed me yesterday your letters to her,” Chase told William, “and I cannot refrain from telling you how much they delighted me.” Making no mention of misspellings or grammatical mistakes, as he usually did with Kate and Nettie, Chase assured Sprague that the “manly affection breathed in them satisfied me that I had not given my daughter to one [who] did not fully appreciate her, or to whom she could not give the full wealth of her affections.”

For Chase, William’s desire to assume “as much of the pecuniary burden as possible” was timely, indeed. The engagement allowed him to divest himself of his financial ties to the Cooke brothers, whose private loans and gifts had assisted him over the years. Recent months had brought mounting criticism over the virtual monopoly the Cookes enjoyed in the lucrative sale of Treasury bonds, but Chase had not felt free to dispense with the arrangement. On June 1, however, he informed Jay Cooke that his compensation for the sale of the bonds would henceforth be reduced. “I have a duty to the country to perform,” he sanctimoniously wrote, “which forbids me to pay rates which will not be approved by all right-minded men.” The following day, he returned a check for $4,200 that he had received from Cooke as profit on the sale of a stock that he had not paid for. “In order to be able to render most efficient service to our country it is essential for me to be right as well as seem right & to seem right as well as be right.”

Late in July, Chase joined Kate and Nettie for a few days’ vacation in Rhode Island, where Sprague had secured rooms near the shore at South Pier. With a carriage provided by Sprague and good dining in the resort hotels on Narragansett Bay, the hardworking secretary relaxed for the first time in months. Leaving the girls at the seashore, he returned to Washington on August 7. Alone in the big house, he complained to Nettie that his only companion was their dog, Nellie, who “comes to see me every evening after dinner and puts her nose up in my face in a sort of sympathetic