Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?” she retorted; “what was it Walpole said? ‘One tiger is charmed if another tiger loses his tail.’”
There was the general laugh at this, which always followed Margaret’s careless and daring candor.
“It was certainly a case of ‘heads or tails’ with the President,” Louis Berkman retorted, with the ease of political detachment in the midst of the inner circle of officialdom; “we shall have a budget now which will carry a billion dollar naval increase.”
“You’ve lived too long in England,” said Fox amusedly, “you don’t get our terms, Berkman. But we shall insist on Mrs. White christening all the new ships.”
“To be sure—I forgot that I was speaking to the money supply, Fox,” he replied; “heaven help White if he gets into your clutches; I should as soon expect mercy from an Iroquois Indian!”
“I don’t mind that from you,” laughed Fox,—“we expect anything from the ‘outs,’—as long as you don’t write us up for the magazines!”
“The gods forbid!” said Berkman sharply, “I’m not ‘the man with the muckrake;’ now if—” he turned his head and, catching a glimpse of the French journalist engaged in an animated discussion with the Italian ex-diplomat, who fairly bristled with suppressed anger, he bit his lip to hide a smile.
One of the secretaries leaned forward to select a new cigarette from the elaborate gold box on the table. “Berkman,” he remarked, “I read that article of yours on the Duma with a great deal of interest, but I got an impression that you lost sight of the main issues in your passion for artistic effects.”
The author responded at once to this challenge with an eagerly indignant denial, and Fox found himself again slightly detached from the group and still standing beside his hostess. She had been taking no part in the conversation and seemed to be in a dreamy mood which ignored alike her environment and her social duties. There was always something in Margaret’s aspect which differentiated her from other people, a spiritual aloofness from the passing moment which could fall upon her suddenly, even in her wildest and gayest moods, and which always carried with it a mystical, uninterpreted suggestion of some tragic destiny, which cast a long shadow before it across the unthinking sybaritism of her life.
“It seems some time since I saw you last,” said Fox; “the House has been very exacting lately and abominably dull. What have you been doing with yourself?”