“Again?”
She laughed. “I’ve been in love four times in the last four years, and almost in love three times more. That’s a poor record for a Washington girl—there are so many temptations, with all these fascinating foreigners streaming through. But I’m not counting the times I’ve been made love to in half a dozen modern languages—I and my father’s money.”
“Possibly you were unjust to some of the men who’ve said they admired you. They may not have attached so much importance to your father’s money as—you do.”
The thrust tickled her vanity—nature had given her an over-measure of vanity to compensate for her under-measure of charm. She looked pleased, though she said: “I don’t deceive myself as to myself.”
“A man might have been attracted to you because you had money,” continued Frothingham dispassionately, “and might have stayed on for your own sake.”
Elsie lifted her eyebrows. “Perhaps,” she said. “I’ll admit it’s possible.”
“And, honestly now, do you pretend that you’d marry a man who had nothing but love to offer you? What has attracted you in the men you thought well of? You say there have been four—or, rather, four and three halves. Has any one of ’em been a poor devil of a nobody?”
Elsie hesitated; in the twilight he saw from the corner of his eye that her upper lip was trembling. They were walking near the tall, white, glistening monument, in the quiet street that skirts the grounds of the White House. “One,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I didn’t care especially for him. But sometimes I think he really did care for me—he was a wild, sensitive creature.” She looked at Frothingham and smiled. “And when I get in my black moods I’m half sorry I sent him away.”
“But you did send him away, didn’t you?” Frothingham’s expression and tone were satirical, yet sympathetic, too. “And you complain of men for being precisely as you are!”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.