“I’d give a lot to know.”
“Well,” he admitted, “your candidate really does stand a show. It’s amazing the way he has come on, without more backing. The chances are that he’ll run second or third.”
“I think he’ll be first,” said Horatia, and was going on when Maud came in, resplendent in black satin and with her blond hair drawn back from her forehead in perfect waves. She looked Horatia over critically. Horatia’s dress was the color of burnt orange and obviously she had done her hair herself and quickly. But even Maud could not cavil.
“I’ve given you young Wentworth,” she said, with the air of one who confers great benefits, “and don’t talk his arm off about politics. He’s rather sporty—was an aviator—is awfully rich, they’re the grain exporters, you know. And do be nice to him, won’t you?”
“It’s easier to be nice to the poor than the sporty rich. But I’ll try.”
She found it surprisingly easy to be nice after all. Anthony Wentworth had the charm of a young man and the finesse of an older one. He talked on all sorts of subjects—about soldiers and soldiering, not from the point of view Horatia heard most often in The Journal office, the economic standpoint, but from the romantic one. And Horatia, who had given up the hope that there was anything romantic in war, listened to him as he talked of chances and perils and adventures, never for a minute in self-exploitation but for sheer joy in having found a listener who knew what he was trying to say.
“But you got out of it,” she protested. “Why didn’t you keep on flying?”
He smiled a little apologetically.
“I don’t enjoy flying for mere sport—or commercially. There’s no pleasure in it as there can be in driving a car or riding a horse. But to run the risks and take the chances and know there’s a reason why you should is different.”
He relapsed into an attack on his salad and Horatia broke up a cracker and thought of the difference between his ideas of war and the war as it was seen by ex-soldiers who drifted into The Journal office with gossip and complaints. But she did not pursue the idea, for when the salad was finished Anthony Wentworth had more to say to her, so much that she forgot about the election and thought of how wonderful it would be to travel through all the queer countries of the world with a man who could ride and shoot and drive an airplane and whose hair grew back from his forehead naturally. Maud, from the head of the table, looked at them and even found time to dream a very hasty dream in which she figured largely as the sister-in-law of Mr. Anthony Wentworth.