“What assurances have you from other senators?” he asked. “Though, perhaps, I need not ask—they have unanimously mounted your colors.” He looked at his colleagues, sporting their roses. Miss Greene gave a little exclamation of annoyance.
“Do you think I don’t know,” she said; “that I don’t understand all that? I might have known that they would not take it seriously! And I thought—I thought—to put the matter so easily to them that I should be spared the necessity of buttonholing them!”
“It was a novel way of buttonholing them,” he laughed.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, catching her breath, “they wear the roses—and laugh at me!”
Her eyes flashed through the mists of vexation that suggested tears.
“You are all alone then?”
Vernon said this in a low, solicitous tone, as if he were dealing with some deep grief.
“All alone.”
“And you represent no one—that is, no society, no club?”
“I am not a paid lobbyist,” she said, “though I believe it is not beyond the proprieties of our profession. I do what I do only from a love of principle. I represent only my sex.” She said it impressively, and then with a quick little laugh that recognized the theatrical that had been in her attitude, she added: “And that, I suspect, without authorization.”