The auto was at the curb. He didn't move until I was almost at the drawing-room door. Then he rushed at me and his look frightened me a little. He caught me by the arm. "It's the last chance, Augusta!" he exclaimed. "Won't you?"
I drew away and hurried out. "Then you don't intend to have anything to do with me after I've crossed the line and become a toiler?" I called back over my shoulder. I couldn't resist the temptation to be thoroughly feminine and leave the matter open by putting him in the wrong with my "woman's last word." I was so low in my mind that I reasoned that my adventure might be as appalling as I feared, in which case it would be well to have an alternative. I wonder if the awful thoughts we sometimes have are our real selves or if they just give us the chance to measure the gap between what we might be as shown by them and what we are as shown by our acts. I hope the latter, for surely I can't be as poor a creature as I so often have impulses to make myself.
Mrs. Carteret was waiting for the servant to open the door. I hurried her back toward the auto, being a little afraid that Jim would be desperate enough to come out and beg her to help him—and I knew she would do it if she were asked. In the first place, Jessie always does what she's asked to do—if it helps her to spend time and breath. In the second place, she'd never let up on me if she thought I had so good a chance to marry. For she knows that Washington is the hardest place in the world for a woman to find a husband unless she's got something that appeals to the ambition of men. Besides, she thinks, as do many of my friends, that I am indifferent to men and discourage them. As if any woman was indifferent to men! The only point is that women's ideas of what constitutes a man differ, and my six years in this cosmopolis have made me somewhat discriminating.
But to return to Jessie, she was full of apologies for being late. "I've thought of nothing but you, dear, for two days and nights. And I thought that for once in my life I'd be on time. Yet here I am, fifteen minutes late, unless that clock's wrong." She was looking at the beautiful little clock set in the dashboard of the auto.
"Only fifteen minutes!" I said. "And you never before were known to be less than half an hour late. You even kept the President waiting twenty minutes."
"Isn't it stupid, this fussing about being on time?" she replied. "I don't believe any but dull people and those who want to get something from one are ever on time. For those who really live, life is so full that punctuality is impossible. But I should have been on time, if I hadn't been down seeing the Secretary of War about Willie Catesby—poor Willie! He has been so handicapped by nature!"
"Did you get it for him?" I asked.
"I think so—third secretary at St. Petersburg. The secretary said: 'But Willie is almost an imbecile, Mrs. Carteret. If we don't send him abroad, his family'll have to put him away.' And I said: 'That's true, Mr. Secretary. But if we don't send that sort of people to foreign courts, how are we to repay the insults they send us in the form of imbecile attachés?' And then I handed him six letters from senators—every one of them a man whose vote he needs for his fight on that nomination. They were real letters. So presently he said, 'Very well, Mrs. Carteret, I'll do what I can to resent the Czar's last insult by exporting Willie to him."
I waited a moment, then burst out with what I was full of. "You think she'll take me?" I said.
Jessie reproached me with tragedy in her always intensely serious gray eyes. "Take you?" she exclaimed. "Take a Talltowers when there's a chance to get one? Why, as soon as I explained who you were, she fairly quivered with eagerness."