Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended, and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.
"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.
"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."
The small plotter nodded approval.
"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed; and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to finish his cigar.
X
IN THE HERBARIUM
The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them, kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic, no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view carefully tucked away inside of it—an outlook upon life which was a survival from his hard-working past—would willingly have dodged, but Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.