He was reading the paper. He looked at her a moment before answering. If a human face could have been expressed in a punctuation mark, that agent's face should have been drawn in a big question mark, with the eyes put somewhere in the hook, and the neck growing longer and longer as he looked.
"Public telephone right across the road," he said.
In avoidance of the loafers' looks, she had walked unheeding straight into the Senator's office. Her first instinct was to withdraw. Then, she saw Brydges; and that curious sensation of repulsion obsessed her. She literally shot the handy man in full retreat with one glance. Then, the joy of the ride down, the heroism of the driver, came back. Perhaps it was the jar of roses, but the thought came what if she could find that vein of heroism in the Senator. When women risk their souls on that "if" and the souls of friends and children; is it vanity, I wonder, or is it the will o' the wisp light that lights erring feet to darkness?
She thought more highly of the Senator that he did not offer to shake hands, just as most of us would think more highly of Judas Iscariot if he had not kissed Christ. Being a Westerner, she had the Westerner's horror of a maverick sporting the brand of a thoroughbred. The Senator took off his glasses and sat tapping them above the U. S. Geological Survey map.
"I trust," he began, "that my man expressed to you my deep regret—my deep distress over—"
"Don't . . . please, don't," interrupted Eleanor, with a passionate break in her voice. "I know you are honest, Senator Moyese, honest to what you believe is right; and I don't want you to feel that you have to lie because I am a woman."
The Senator opened his mouth, took a breath, and shut it again.
She understood him well enough to know that if he had to toy with his glasses for a twelve month, he would wait for her to play down first. Yet she recognized the instinct of his manhood to rescue the confusion of her embarrassment when he put forward his hand casually and said—"See my roses, Miss Eleanor? They are a new variety of American Beauties. See, each petal has a white veining? Know how those roses are produced? Ages and ages of poor trash worthless common roses have been sacrificed to produce this perfect type."
"That's your theory of life, isn't it?" she asked, vaguely conscious that the dragon was disarming her anger.
"Isn't it nature's?" asked Moyese gently. "The fit survive because they are fit; the exceptional; the few; while the worthless go to waste?"