I grinned. "Shall we not take it across direct to Mr. Blair for publication in his Globe?"
Mr. Calhoun smiled rather bitterly at this jest. The hostility of Blair to the Tyler administration was a fact rather more than well known.
"'Twill all get into Mr. Polk's newspaper fast enough," commented he at last. "He gets all the news of the Mexican ministry!"
"Ah, you think he cultivates the Doña Lucrezia, rather than adores her!"
"I know it! One-third of Jim Polk may be human, but the other two-thirds is politician. He will flatter that lady into confidences. She is well nigh distracted at best, these days, what with the fickleness of her husband and the yet harder abandonment by her old admirer Pakenham; so Polk will cajole her into disclosures, never fear. In return, when the time comes, he will send an army of occupation into her country! And all the while, on the one side and the other, he will appear to the public as a moral and lofty-minded man."
"On whom neither man nor woman could depend!"
"Neither the one nor the other."
The exasperation of his tone amused me, as did this chance importance of what seemed to me at the time merely a petticoat situation.
"Silk! Mr. Calhoun," I grinned. "Still silk and dimity, my faith! And you!"
He seemed a trifle nettled at this. "I must take men and women and circumstances as I find them," he rejoined; "and must use such agencies as are left me."