Even Phil Gramm, the Tabasco-tongued Texan who spent years tormenting the Clinton administration, sounds positively expansive when he evaluates Hillary's prospects. "In the Senate," he explains, "if you work hard, and you get things done, nothing else matters. So in the end, it" -- meaning Pardongate -- "won't matter. That's the fairness of the system."

And Hillary is nothing if not a hard worker. In fact, there has always been a tremendous gulf between Hillary the icon and Hillary the grind. Hillary the icon earned sixteen months of campaign coverage and attracted 50 reporters to her first coffee with the twelve other Senate women. But Hillary the grind went on a listening tour of New York, can dutifully list all the reasons why New York State should be in the Northeast Dairy Compact, and exited a high-speed-railway press conference last month exclaiming to a colleague, "Boy, wasn't Kay Bailey" -- Hutchison, Republican of Texas -- "terrific? She knew all of those subsidies!"

No one in the Senate likes a show horse. But a workhorse can command admiration, if not warmth, from her colleagues. "I knew my colleagues in the Senate would like Mrs. Clinton once they got to know her," explains Barbara Mikulski, dean of the Senate women and Democrat of Maryland, "because she's crazy about homework and briefings."

And a very fast learner, apparently. Hillary has already figured out how to cope with Strom. The next time she ran into Thurmond, notes Breaux, she gave him the "Clinton-Arafat handshake -- that is, you take your left hand and grab his shoulder, so he won't get any closer." He demonstrates, his arm outstretched, like a mime desperate to keep a door closed. "She was very nice, very polite . . . and verrrrry cautious."

So this is the weird, prep-school hothouse that Hillary has joined: A few weeks ago, I found myself in a senators only elevator, taking a ride down to the basement of the Capitol. Its other occupants were Paul Wellstone, the lefty professor turned senator from Minnesota; Sam Brownback, a conservative Christian who replaced Bob Dole; and Gramm. Wellstone, a full head shorter than either of his two colleagues, tugged at Brownback's sleeve. "I wanted to ask you about your trip!"

"We said hello from a distance. Over the heads of the Secret Service. She's like an aircraft carrier with a task force around her."
-- Judd Gregg

Brownback nodded, explaining to Gramm in haiku: "Thailand. Sex trafficking."

Gramm raised his eyebrows suggestively. Wellstone lunged at him. "Phil, don't say anything!" he said, shaking him by both his elbows. "We're in an elevator with a reporter! I am protecting you, do you understand? I am saving you from yourself!"

Gramm, grinning, couldn't resist. "Well," he drawled, looking expectantly at Brownback, "how closely did you look into it?"

The official line among Senate Republicans is that Hillary had earned her rightful place in the Senate, and that she is therefore entitled to the benefit of the doubt. In Gramm's words: "She's Hillary Clinton, not Bill Clinton. Judging my wife based on me, that's not fair." He pronounces "wife" wahf.

But for the first month of the legislative session, some Republican senators couldn't quite conceal their contempt. In late January, I asked Tim Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican, whether his new colleague had disarmed him yet with her charm. He looked at me blankly. "No," he said. "But I did have a colleague ask, 'Does she ever smile?' "

Two weeks later, I asked Judd Gregg, a boyish New Hampshire senator who serves on two of the same committees as Hillary, whether he'd spoken to the former First Lady yet. "Uh, we said hello from a distance." Pause. "Over the heads of the Secret Service." Another pause. "She's surrounded by a cadre. She's like an aircraft carrier with a task force around her."

McCain, meanwhile, was appalled by the $8 million book deal and the $190,000 worth of gifts she'd made off with -- "As the author of the gift ban, it doesn't get her off on the right foot with me" -- and Jeff Sessions, the spitfire former Alabama attorney general, was fuming about the pardons for the four crooked rabbis in New Square. "It is troubling," he said. "Very, very troubling. To give a pardon for political votes is beneath contempt."

You could really see the hostility on the Senate floor. There were a few moments when Hillary talked to virtually no one -- she just stood by herself, awkwardly looking around. A few Republicans seemed to go out of their way to snub her. On the day of her third vote, Nickles spent a good three minutes standing directly in front of Clinton, waiting to approach the desks where votes are tallied. He kept his back to her the entire time.

But it soon dawned on the Senate Republicans: How vindictive could they really afford to be? Most of them realize that tormenting Hillary Clinton -- or any female senator, for that matter -- usually backfires, because they come across as a bunch of bullying, overbearing husbands. Even Arlen Specter (known among Senate staffers as Mr. Burns) didn't discuss Hillary's brothers at his pardon hearings. "I don't know if it was because she's a fellow senator," says Sessions, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, "or if it was because there was no evidence to show she did anything wrong. I suspect it was both."

As a rule, alienating your Senate colleagues is a pretty bad idea, no matter how much you loathe them or their politics. "Because if one senator decides that there are people he or she won't work with," explains Dorgan, "at some point, somewhere down the road, that senator is going to have legislation. And it's going to wind up in some subcommittee where those people he or she slighted have the opportunity to say, 'Thanks a lot -- here's your payback.' "

Getting along is especially important given the Republicans' knife-thin margin. Though no GOP senator dares speak about this directly, Strom Thurmond's health, once actually taken for granted, is now on all of their minds -- remarkably, it looks like he may finally surrender to age. ("When Strom sneezes," a top GOP aide ruefully told me a few weeks ago, "49 senators scramble to hand him a Kleenex.") If Thurmond dies, the governor of South Carolina, a Democrat, gets to choose his successor, and the Democrats become the majority party. In the 2002 election, if the Republicans lose so much as one seat -- and twenty of them are up for re-election, as opposed to fourteen Democrats -- again, Democrats will win control of the chamber. And Hillary, within a couple years (even months!), could be just the subcommittee chairman Dorgan was talking about.