It is Boston, July 2004. The setting is a downtown restaurant to which the editor Tina Brown has invited Hillary Clinton and a handful of notables, including Caroline Kennedy, filmmaker Michael Moore and former Sen. George McGovern. What is immediately striking is Clinton's youthful appearance, bright laugh, and blue eyes that appear a little too round when she gazes at us with curiosity.

Sometimes her expression is briefly clouded by a streak of stifled pain, obstinate and not wholly contained. Five years earlier, she was the most humiliated wife in America, a woman whose private life was thrown open — fully and relentlessly — to public scrutiny. So she can talk national and international politics until she is blue in the face. She can sing the praises of John Kerry, whom her party has just nominated in an effort to deny George W. Bush a second term. And she can expound on her role as the junior senator from New York.

Still, there persists an idea that I cannot push out of my head, and that I enter into the travel journal that I am writing for The Atlantic. The idea is this: To avenge her husband and to take revenge on him, to wash away the stain on the family and show what an unblemished Clinton administration might look like, this woman will sooner or later be a candidate for the presidency of the United States.