Fanny walked over to Guy, who looked as if he were trying hard to think of something worth saying. “Well, you have been paying me attentions, haven’t you, Guy?” she said, her voice growing tender as she finished the question. Then she triumphantly exclaimed to her father: “Now!”
Guy was plainly embarrassed. He tried to assume a careless air. “Oh, yes, I’ve been giving Miss Fanny all my spare time,” he replied, entering into the joke.
The face of Jonathan Wallace grew severe again. “You could find better use for your time, I haven’t a doubt,” he said, without looking at the young fellow. “Well, sis, I’m going home. I’ve had enough of this rabble. I’ve rubbed up against politicians enough in the past half-hour to make me hate my country. To hear ’em talk you’d think the country’d been invented to support their families. This is the most selfish town I’ve ever been in. It’s every man for himself and nobody for his neighbor.”
“There is a lot of wire-pulling going on here, that’s true, sir,” said Guy.
“Wire-pulling!” Wallace’s face expressed a profound scorn. “There was a fellow in the other room mistook me for the Secretary of State, and he buttonholed me for half an hour, talking about the benefit he could confer on the country by being made Minister to Austria. Minister to Austria! I wouldn’t give him a job as an errand boy in my factory.”
Fanny threw her arms around her father’s neck. “Poor old dad! he does have such a hard time whenever he comes to Washington. Don’t you, dad?”
She drew her hands away and danced behind Wallace’s broad back, jumping on her toes and smiling satirically over his shoulder at young Fullerton, who had assumed his gravest expression.
“Then there’s another fellow,” Wallace went on, addressing the boy, “who’s been trying to work me because I am related to Briggs’s wife. I forget what he wanted, now. Some job in New York. If I had to stay in this town ten days at a stretch I’d lose my reason. Talk about serving the country! Rifling the country is what those fellows are doing. If I had the power I’d clap the whole gang of ’em in jail.”
“Dad, you are very cross to-night,” said Fanny, decidedly. “You’d better go home. Think how I feel, having you talk like that before this rising young politician.”
“Well, sir, if you intend to make a politician of yourself I’m sorry for you. I’m going, sis.”