She answered him lightly, but her face softened and her eyes shone with sympathy.
"Aren't you by way of being just a little sentimental?"
"Perhaps," he admitted. "If I am, let me feel the luxury of it."
"One reads different things of you."
"For instance?"
"Town Topics says that you have become an interesting figure at many social functions. You must meet attractive people there."
"I only wish that I could find them so," he answered. "London has been almost feverishly gay lately and every one seems to have discovered a vogue for entertaining politicians. There seems to be a sort of idea that dangerous corners may be rubbed off us by a judicious application of turtle soup and champagne."
"Cynic!" she scoffed pleasantly.
"Well, I don't know," he went on. "From any other point of view, some of the entertainments to which I have been bidden appear utterly without meaning. However, it is part of my programme to prove to the world that we Democrats can open our arms wide enough to include every class in life. Therefore, I go to many places I should otherwise avoid. I have studied the attitude of the younger women whom I have approached, purely impersonally and without the slightest hypersensitiveness. They have all been perfectly pleasant, perfectly disposed for conversation or any of the usual social amenities. But they know that I have in the background a wife. To flirt with a married man of fifty isn't worth while."
"It appears to me," she said, with a slight note of severity in her tone, "that you have set your mind upon having a perfectly frivolous time."