Hugo tried to lead him back to the topic that interested both of them so acutely. Skorvsky shrugged. "You are polite—or else you are curious. I know you—an American business man in Washington with a purpose. Not an apparent purpose—just now. No, no. Just now you are a host, cultivated and genial, and retiring. But at the proper time—ah! A dam somewhere in Arizona. A forest that you covet in Alaska. Is it not so?"
"What if it is not?"
Skorvsky stared at the ceiling. "What then? A secret? Yes, I thought that about you while we were talking to the others to-day. There is something deep about you, my new friend. You are a power. Possibly you are not even really an American."
"That is wrong."
"You assure me that I am right. But I will agree with you. You are, let us say, the very epitome of the man Mr. Mencken and Mr. Lewis tell us about so charmingly. I am Russian and I cannot know all of America. You might divulge your errand, perhaps?"
"Suppose I said it was to set the world aright?"
Skorvsky laughed lightly. "Then I should throw myself at your feet."
Both men were in deadly earnest, Hugo not quite willing to adopt the Russian's almost effeminate delicacy, yet eager to talk to him, or to someone like him—someone who was more than a great self-centred wheel in the progress of the nation. Hugo yielded a little further. "Yet that is my purpose. And I am not altogether impotent. There are things I can do—" He got up from the table and stretched himself with a feline grace.
"Such as?"
"I was thinking of your two compatriots who were recently given such wretched justice. Suppose they were liberated by force. What then?"