“You see,” said Budd, gazing earnestly at Gertrude, “that you find all men ready to capitulate. The burden now lies on your own shoulders. It is for you to direct your allies in the line that they should take.”
Gertrude smiled in apparent amusement; but she had a painful consciousness that her hand would tremble perceptibly if she held it out straight before her.
“It seems,” she remarked, looking at Fenton, “that everything has been turned around. As a guide and adviser to men, I fear that woman is not yet quite up in her part.”
“As my friend Richard Stoughton,—you met him at the musicale last evening, Miss Van Vleck,—as Stoughton puts it, woman has evoluted into a mentor from a tormentor,” remarked Fenton, proving that he was no longer a young man, by quoting the witticism of a friend and giving credit to the author.
“I have been told that Mr. Stoughton is clever,” remarked Gertrude. “He is on a newspaper, is he not?”
A slight flush mounted to Fenton’s cheek.
“Yes,” he answered, looking at Budd steadily; “he is one of my colleagues on the Trumpet.”
“Ah,” commented Budd, with what he doubtless considered an effectively Napoleonic drawl, “you are—ah—in journalism, Mr. Fenton?”
There was nothing offensive in the words themselves, but the speaker’s tone implied that he considered journalism a line of endeavor that was not recognized in his set. Gertrude Van Vleck understood the veiled sneer in his voice, and her eyes shone mischievously as she cast a rapid glance at Fenton, and then said to Budd,—
“It seems to me, and I know so many women who agree with me, that journalism is, above all others, the appropriate profession for a man of intellect in these days.”