“I’m so disappointed,” she said presently. “All winter I’ve had the same man take me in everywhere—you know, we follow precedence very closely here in Washington. And, when I found I was to have a new man, I had such hopes. The other man and I had got bored to death with each other. And now—you’re threatening to be a failure!”
Frothingham did not like this—it was pert for a woman to speak thus to him; he resented it as a man and he resented it as Lord Frothingham. “That’s a jest, ain’t it?” he drawled. “We English, you know, have a horribly defective sense of American humour.”
“No, it wasn’t a jest,” she replied. “It was a rudeness, and I beg your pardon. I thought to say something smart, and—I missed. Let’s change the subject. Do you see that intellectual-looking man with the beard on the other side of the table—next to Ysobel Ballantyne?”
“The surly chap?”
“Yes—and he’s surly because mamma has made a dreadful mistake. She’s put him two below the place his rank entitles him to. He’ll act like a savage all evening.”
“Fancy! What a small matter to fly into a rage over.”
“A small matter for a large man, but a large matter for a small man. Sometimes I think all men are small. They’re much vainer than women!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because of what I’ve seen in Washington. They say the women started this craze for precedence. I don’t know whether that’s so or not. But I do know that in the three years I’ve been out I’ve found the men worse than the women. And those things look so much pettier in a man, too.”
“But I thought there wasn’t any rank in this country.”