Because Democrats do not control the Senate, they do not control the agenda at committee hearings, and they can choose few of the witnesses. Yet Clinton still sits through these meetings almost in their entirety, because she knows everyone in the Senate is watching her, wondering how serious she is, wondering whether she's going to be a prima donna or roll up her sleeves and work.

Pete Domenici, the committee chairman, is speaking. He's a friendly man, an old-timer who actually remembers when members stayed in Washington on weekends and had dinner with one another's families. "And then you," he's saying. "Senator Hillary -- you're next."

Senator Hillary? Domenici seems to realize he's made a gaffe. He leaps up to whisper something in her ear, throwing his arm around her as he speaks. Whatever he says, it makes both of them grin. She puts her hands to her face, smiles, and stifles a laugh.

I ask him later that week what he whispered to her. Was it to apologize for calling her Senator Hillary? He grins. "I caught that mistake," he says. "It wasn't about that. It was about something else. And I'm not telling you."

The hearing began at 10:30. Senator Hillary got her first chance to speak at 12:20.

Democrats care for Hillary both more and less than Republicans do. A number have always found her more reliable than her husband, who embarrassed them with his lying, lost control of Congress for them with his overreaching, and then, once Republicans took over, habitually betrayed them with his triangulating. She, they believe, is the real deal.

"She came over to say hello, and she had a hairdo just like everybody else."
-- Jesse Helms

Then along came Pardongate. "A lot of people were concerned that so much of the discussion after the election was about Clinton's last few days in office," concedes Breaux. "It was a distraction, clearly, and, um, I think most people wish it hadn't occurred. But look -- I'm sure he wishes the same thing! I mean, I've talked to him since, and he wishes it hadn't all happened, but it did."

So what was Clinton thinking?

"To some extent, he wasn't."

Even before Marc and Denise Rich became household names, though, plenty of Democrats were toting their own satchel of resentments toward Hillary. "She's like what happened when the astronaut John Glenn got elected -- cubed," explains Joe Biden, the Delaware Democrat. "And there's a lot of egos in this place. So when any senator walks into a meeting, into a room, into a crowd, with Hillary, all of you in the press are going to immediately go to her, no matter how much more clout or significance the other senator has. And that's obviously going to generate some difficulty with her colleagues."

Like Chuck Schumer -- who, at least technically, is still the senior senator from New York. They say the most dangerous place in the Capitol is between Chuck Schumer and a camera, and if Hillary wanted to, she could occupy that place all the time. Though Schumer undeniably campaigned hard for the First Lady, her presence in the Senate, on some level, must kill him. ("I'm sure he finds it galling," says one of his New York colleagues. "Don't get me started," says another. "They'll eat each other up," says a third.)

Of course, many senators from the same state and the same party wind up disliking, if not outright loathing, each other. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Robert Torricelli and Frank Lautenberg, when the two were still serving together. (Two years ago, at a Democratic retreat at the Library of Congress, the former famously snarled to the latter: "I'm going to cut your balls off.")

Chuck and Hillary will probably get along better than that.

The day she got sworn in, Biden recalls, Hillary addressed her new colleagues in the old Senate chamber and asked them to forgive her for all the media attention she was going to attract, at least initially. "And she's not speaking up in the caucuses," he adds. "Other freshmen are talking a lot more than Hillary is. A whole lot more. At least three freshmen have talked ten times as much as she has. Hillary listens."

But her potential for refracting the limelight requires constant monitoring. Recently, I called the office of a New York Democrat, and his staff had just completed a legislative meeting, going through their bills one-by-one, trying to determine whether Hillary's involvement would help or hurt their boss. At her first coffee with the Senate women, Hillary's colleagues writhed as the cameras focused almost exclusively on her. The first day the freshmen Democrats gave a press conference, Daschle, who introduced them, told the media each senator was only allowed one question. "Of course, she took the first question," deadpans Tom Carper, formerly the governor of Delaware and easily the funniest guy in the Democratic caucus. He pauses. "And then all the other questions were, 'So, Senator, what do you think about Hillary?' "

Perhaps no Democrat needed to be more persuaded of Hillary's virtues than Robert Byrd. Byrd is one of the Senate's living legends. He's a master of parliamentary procedure and an avid history buff, and on a good afternoon, he can work in references to both Socrates and Pliny the Elder in a floor speech. Byrd may be the only sitting senator to speak in standard written English. He wears three-piece suits to work every day. And at 83, he has supposedly shaken the hand of one of every three constituents in the state of West Virginia.