"They are exactly two too many. I have written and asked Sally Carter to come over and chaperon you in case I do not feel equal to the ordeal at the last moment. I am surprised that she takes your course so quietly, but on the whole am relieved; you need some one respectable to keep you in countenance."
"This house reeks with respectability; no one would ever notice the absence of a chaperon. Sally is not only quiescent, but sympathetic. She knows that I have got to the end of teas and charities, and she believes in people choosing their own lives. She says she would join a travelling circus if her proclivities happened to point that way."
Mrs. Madison shuddered. "I do not pretend to understand the present generation, and the more I hear of it the less I wish to. As for Sally I love her, but I should detest her if I didn't, for she is the worst form of snob: she is so rich and so well born that she thinks she can dress like a servant-girl and affect the manners of a barmaid." "Molly! So you were haunting 'pubs' when I supposed you were yawning at home? I hope you did not tell the barmaids your real name."
"Well, I suppose I should not criticise people that I know nothing about," said Mrs. Madison, colouring and serious. She changed the subject hastily. "Jack, I hope you will stay this afternoon. It would be the greatest comfort to have you in the house."
"I will stay, certainly," said Emory. He had taken his Sunday dinner at the old house in I Street for almost a quarter of a century. To-day he had been unusually silent, and had contracted his brows nervously every time Betty looked at him. She understood perfectly, and amused herself by turning round upon him several times with abrupt significance. However, she spared him until they had taken Mrs. Madison to the parlor and gone to the library, where he might smoke his after-dinner cigar. He sat down in front of a window, and the sunlight poured over him, glistening his handsome head and illuminating his skin. Betty supposed that some women might fall quite desperately in love with him; and in addition to his beauty he was a noble and high-minded gentleman, whose narrowness was due to the secluded life he chose to lead.
"Now!" she exclaimed, "come out with it! You've had eleven days, and one can learn a good deal in that time."
He bit sharply at the end of his cigar, but answered without hesitation.
"It is almost impossible to learn anything in Washington to the detriment of the Senate. There seems to be a sort of esprit de corps in the entire city. They look politely horrified if you suggest that a Senator of the United States, honouring Washington with the society of his wives and daughters, is anything that he should not be. I was obliged to go to New York and Boston to get the information I wanted, and even now it is far from complete. I don't believe it is possible to arrive at anything like accurate knowledge on the subject."
"Well, what did you get? Washington is a well-ordered community with a high moral tone—it is said to have fewer scandals than any city in the country—and there is no sordid commercial atmosphere to lower it. It is the great city of leisure in everything but legislation and paying calls; so it seems to me that it would be the last place to fondle in its bosom ninety distinguished scoundrels. But go on. What did you learn in Boston and New York?"
"That a little of everything is represented in the Senate,—that is about what it amounts to. There are unquestionably men there who bought their seats from legislatures, and there are men who are agents for trusts, syndicates, and railroad corporations, as well as three party bosses—"