First, a joke. “You know, I stood next to Donald Trump in three debates for four and a half hours, proving once again I have the stamina to be president,” she said. Then, the pivot to seriousness. “I take it really seriously,” she said. “I think the problems that keep you up at night, that stand in the way of your getting ahead and staying ahead, of providing the best opportunity of a good middle class job with a rising income for you and your kids—those are the problems that someone running for president should actually listen to, pay attention to, and come up with solutions for.”

What had she been through over the past year and a half—what had America been through? She had prepared for a normal campaign, prepared for something like 2012, a boring slog against a sane and decent regular Republican whom she would strain to argue was Wrong On The Issues. Instead she got a hair-on-fire carnival ride, a Russian spy thriller, a national nervous breakdown of an election.

Every day she got up and recited the same jokes and exhortations, and every day the hackers released more of her advisers’ private communications onto the internet, and every day her improbable opponent, a sort of primal scream in human form, waved his arms and called her a criminal.

She had piles and piles of proposals—to rightsize the prisons and roll back deportations and pay for child care and on and on—and then it turned out the election wasn’t about any of that. It was about trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and waiting for the fire to burn out. It was about being slightly less of a monster. Even then, about half of America looked at her and was not convinced.

“I do have a lot of plans, I do!” she said in New Hampshire. “I get criticized for having so many plans! ... I do have this old-fashioned idea that if I’m here asking for your vote, to be your president, I should tell you what I’m going to do! And maybe, as I said yesterday in North Carolina, maybe it is a bit of a women’s thing, because we make lists.” She had, in fact, said more or less the same thing the previous day, in North Carolina. And she’d said it the day before that, in Pennsylvania.

In the final days there would be a new heart attack, the latest self-inflicted wound from the neverending, picayune email scandal, and Clinton and everyone around her would freak out while working very hard to seem not to be freaking out at all, because that is how they do things. (“Careful but angry” was one Clinton adviser’s three-word description to me of the internal mood.)

And she would keep putting one foot in front of the other, trusting the machine she built to do its work. Like she always had, she would accomplish with perspiration what she could not with inspiration. She was, in all probability, going to be the next president, and then what? How on earth was she the answer to the question posed by this insane campaign? How on earth would she reckon with the disturbed country she had struggled so hard to win over?