Frothingham maintained his look of blank indifference, but underneath he was vastly amused—“And they’re quite unconscious what cads they are,” he thought. As if in answer to this, Senator Ballantyne said to him, in a tone of humourous apology: “Our constituents are plain people, Lord Frothingham—honest, simple. They lead quiet, old-fashioned lives. I always send my family away or make them ‘come off their perch’ when I have to receive anyone from home—that is, any but my regular political lieutenants. To tell you the gospel truth, I’m ashamed to have my old friends see how absurd we’ve become.”
At six o’clock Frothingham was idling in a small smoking room in the rear of the great parlour—it was on the second floor. Senator Ballantyne came in and grew red in the cheeks. “Oh, I didn’t expect to see you,” he said, with an embarrassed laugh.
Frothingham pretended not to notice, but he instantly saw the embarrassment, and the cause of it as well. The Senator was not in evening dress, nor even in his uniform of “statesman’s frock.” To combat the unfavourable impression his great castle would make upon the excursionists from his distant State he had got himself up in an old blue sack suit with torn pocket and ragged cuff, in trousers bagging at the knees and springing fantastically where they covered his boot-legs.
He seated himself and talked absently until there was a ring of the front doorbell. He started up. “I must go,” he said. “That’s the first ones.” And he hurried away.
Frothingham waited a few seconds, then went into the hall and leaned carelessly on the banister where it commanded a view of the front door. He chuckled. Not the pompous and liveried butler was opening it, but Senator Ballantyne himself in his impressive livery of the “plain people.” And Frothingham grinned as his great hearty voice—how different, how much more natural, than his usual voice—rolled out a “Why, hello, boys! Hello, Jim! Hello, Rankin. How d’ye do, Mrs. Fisher. Glad to see you, Miss Branigan. The maid wasn’t about, so I thought I wouldn’t keep you waitin’. Come right in and take off your things. Ladies, I’m sorry to say my wife’s run off and left me—had to go to a dinner where the President and his wife are to be. You know, we ain’t allowed to decline. But we won’t miss her. My oldest girl Sue’s in the parlour. You remember Sue?”
They all went into the “parlour”—that is, the little first-floor reception room, which had been partly refurnished, or rather, dismantled, for the occasion. The bell rang. Frothingham chuckled again, as he saw, not butler nor manservant nor Senator, but a neatly dressed upstairs girl, without a cap, hasten to open the door. As he heard the rustle of skirts on the stairway leading to the sleeping rooms, he prudently strolled into the smoking room.
When he went up to dress Hutt said to him: “Beg pardon, my lord, but my, it’s queer, the dinner party they’re ’avin hin the little back room.”
Frothingham went on shaving. Hutt took silence as permission to gossip.
“They’ve sent hoff hall the servants, hexceptin’ the maids, my lord. They’ve got heverythink on the table at once and they’re waitin’ on themselves.”
“Last night,” said Frothingham, “you gave me a shirt with a spot on the collar. You’re getting careless and impudent, Hutt.”