“But suppose you’d fallen in love after he came along?”
Fanny wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like to suppose unpleasant things,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s only one man in the world good enough for her.”
“Who’s that?”
“The man that she married, of course,” Fanny exclaimed.
The dinner proved to be a perfect success. When the great men at the table learned that it was Fanny Wallace’s first dinner-party they paid her such attention that she let herself go completely and kept them laughing by her naïve impertinences. The sight of young Clinton gave Guy Fullerton deep relief; he knew that the blotched-faced, thin and anæmic Englishman, with the ponderous manner of the embryonic statesman, would appeal only to Fanny’s sense of humor. Fanny, indeed, was the centre of interest throughout the dinner; even the great men’s wives petted her. When the ladies left the table to go into the drawing-room Helen had a chance to whisper to her: “My dear, you’ve been splendid. I sha’n’t dare give any more dinner-parties without you.”
“Oh, aren’t they lovely?” Fanny cried, rolling her eyes. “Only I talked so much I forgot all about eating anything. I’m actually hungry.”
The guests for the reception began to arrive shortly after nine o’clock. Long before this hour, however, the sidewalk near the house was crowded with curiosity-seekers, in which the colored population of Washington was numerously represented. Guy hurried from point to point, giving directions to the servants, offering greetings, and showing his fine, white teeth in frank, boyish enjoyment of his importance. As the newspaper people came, he exaggerated his cordiality; some of the men he addressed by their first names. “You’ll find the list of guests all ready for you, old man,” he remarked, placing his hand on the shoulder of one of them, “in the little room just leading off the dining-room. Down there. And there’s everything else you can want, there at the sideboard,” he added, significantly, with the consciousness of being very much a man of the world. “I knew you newspaper people would like to have a place to yourselves.”
II
“Well, I guess I am mad! I’ve never been treated so in all my life!”