He smiled and shook his head.
"I don't know whether they wanted me so much. I needed them."
"Your brothers, you mean. The units that make your brotherhood."
She was quoting from his last reported speech, and her spirits rose as she felt how glad she was to have been ready. It seemed to her that there were so many things she had to say at once that they would come tumultuously. MacLeod, when his position was assured, was quite willing to let the disciple talk. It was only over ground not yet tilled that his eloquence fell like rain. And Electra, leaning toward him in a brilliant, even a timid expectation, was saying,—
"Tell me about Russia. What do you foresee?"
A reporter had asked him the same question a few hours before, and the answer would be in the evening paper. He smiled at her, and spread out his hands in a disclaiming gesture.
"You know what I foresee. You know what you foresee yourself. It is the same thing."
"Yes," said Electra, "it is the same thing."
But there were times when MacLeod wanted to escape from posturing, even though it brought him adulation.
"I haven't apologized for breaking in on you like this," he said, with his engaging smile. "They told me at Grant's that I should probably find him over here, in the garden. The next house they said. This is the next house?"