"So you see Republicans come up somewhat sheepishly and shakin' hands with her, sayin' hello," says Breaux. "I saw Shelby" -- first name Richard, an early and rather vocal foe of Bill Clinton -- "talkin' to her yesterday. I thought that was good."

"Senator Lott has been gracious in the way he has talked to her personally," adds Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. "Far more gracious," he ruefully notes, "than what his public comments would have anticipated."

Gramm now brags about how he never personally attacked the First Lady. "If you ask people to list who killed her health-care bill," he says, "they'd say me, but never did I call it anything but the president's bill. Other people called it 'Hillary Care.' I never did that."

A butcher could not slice baloney this thin. But a senator can.

The day the Starr Report came out, congressman Pete King saw Hillary. It should have been an excruciating experience. It wasn't. Just a couple weeks before, the Long Island Republican had been on a trip to Ireland with the First Lady, and she happened to have met his mother -- who at the time was in the middle of a logistical nightmare involving her plane ticket home. Now, as King sat awkwardly in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, his head aswarm in the strangeness of the moment, Hillary strolled right up to him. "Your mother ever catch that plane?" she asked.

"That's Hillary," King says. "You see her a month later, and she asks you an obscure question about your last conversation. Unlike her husband, who only listens to about maybe half of what you say to him, she really listens to everything. That has to disarm all but the most hard-assed senator. When she asks, 'What happened to your grandson at Communion?' -- that's gonna weaken some of that hatred."

Her charm offensive has already begun. Almost the moment she set foot in the Senate, Hillary greeted Jesse Helms. "She came over to say hello," he marvels, "and she had a hairdo just like everybody else! And I said, 'I believe I read in the newspaper that you're now a United States senator.' She just laughed. I said, 'I hope I see you.' "

The 79-year-old senator, who now scoots around the Capitol on a motorized wheelchair, seems to bear her no grudge. "I always got a kick out of her," he says. "She said I was the head of a vast right-wing conspiracy -- on TV! A few weeks after, I was on the receiving line at a State Department dinner, and I said, 'Vast right-wing conspiracy reporting for duty, ma'am.' " He salutes. "It didn't faze her."

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Senate's only Native American (he has a long, frizzy ponytail and got special dispensation from the Rules Committee to wear his bolo ties on the Senate floor), offered Hillary a ride on his motorcycle. Chuck Hagel, a handsome, fiftysomething GOP maverick from Nebraska, had Hillary to lunch in the privacy of his office. He says he didn't tell his colleagues. But he didn't keep it a secret from them, either. "I think she, uh, has come into the Senate under a considerable glare," he explains, "and that probably has put her in a bit of an awkward situation with her colleagues, so I figured she probably hasn't had many invitations just to talk a little bit, and just to get acquainted. She certainly is very charming and very gracious and very lovely and very smart."

Charming, gracious, lovely, smart? Good Lord -- didn't this man get the memo?

Dorgan is right: These people need each other -- sort of like the contestants on Survivor, another narcissistic group of strangers thrown together under artificial circumstances. So even as the pardon hearings were coming to a boil, and even as he was lamenting Bill Clinton's ethics on TV, Jeff Sessions, perhaps the Clinton family's most rabid Senate foe, was discussing his bankruptcy bill with Hillary, hoping she'd support it.

Does this mean he'd work with her? "Sure," he says.

So he won't filibuster a Clinton bill, just for sport? Or stall it in the cloakroom?

"Oh, no," he says. Beat. "Unless it's a bad bill."

It's nearly noon, and Clinton is sitting in a dull-as-nails Budget Committee hearing on agriculture and energy deregulation, trying valiantly to look interested in what the witnesses are saying. Because she's the most junior Democrat on the committee, she sits all the way at the end of the horseshoe-shaped table. She writes things down in a spiral notebook occasionally. She cradles her head in her hand.