“Just the same, I've heard you say over and over again that you wish Roosevelt were President now,” she persisted. “Why do you say that if you are so down on him?”
Landover shrugged his shoulders expressively.
“I can wish that, my dear, and still not be an admirer of Mr. Roosevelt,” he replied. “But to return to Percival, isn't it quite plain to you that he was pouting like a school-boy because he had not been asked to take part in today's exercises?”
“He was asked to take part in them. I asked him myself.”
He glanced at her sharply. “You never told me you had asked him, Ruth.”
“The night the crime was committed,” she said briefly. “He was very nice about it. He promised to sing in the choir and—and to help me with the decorations. After our unpleasant experience the next day, he had the—shall we say tact or kindness?—to reconsider his promise.”
“Openly advertising the fact that he preferred to have no part in any entertainment you were arranging,” was Landover's comment. “I don't believe it was because of any particular delicacy of feeling on his part, my dear. In any case, the fact remains that he let you go ahead with the affair, and then, bang! right in the middle of it he stages his cheap, melodramatic, moving-picture act. Bosh!”
She turned on him with blazing eyes.
“You will not see anything good in him, will you? You can't be fair, can you? Well, I can be,—and I am. He has been fair with both of us,—and I am ashamed of the way I have treated him. We deserved his rebuke that morning, and he did not hesitate to turn us back,—although he realized what it would mean. He loves me, Abel Landover,—he loves me a thousand times more than you do, in spite of all your protestations. He—”
“Why, Ruth,—I—I—”