"I took it alone."
"Where's your horse?"
"I don't know. I hope to God he breaks a leg or rips himself open on barbed wire or something."
There was a vindictive ferocity in his voice that surprised Forbes.
The luncheon, which Ten Eyck had commanded, was announced just then, and they all adjourned to the dining-room. Forbes resented Enslee's habit of "my-dear"-ing Persis, but took solace from the thought that he should soon confound his rival with the news of his own triumph.
Suddenly, in his joy at being near to Persis, he remembered that he had neglected Senator Tait, after promising to meet his daughter. He did not venture to leave his own table; but as soon as the luncheon was eaten, and while Winifred and Mrs. Neff and Persis sneaked off somewhere for their after-coffee cigarettes, he sought out Tait and found him with a tall and self-reliant girl whom he introduced as Mildred.
Forbes made the usual remarks one makes to a little girl one meets again as a grown woman. She had indeed changed from the shy and leggy little minx to this robust, ample-bosomed bachelor girl with the sorrows of the world on her shoulders and pity and courage warring in her resolute eyes.
Recalling what the Senator had said of her appalling lore, Forbes was at some loss for words. He said, at last, the obvious thing, waving his hand toward the great park and the panorama of river and headland spread out beyond:
"Wonderful, isn't it?"
But Mildred, instead of an equally commonplace answer, sighed: "I suppose it is, but I—somehow I can't take much pleasure in beautiful things like these. I keep thinking how the poor kiddies and their worn-out mothers in the tenements would love to see it—and never will. And when I think how much money it costs to build and keep up this place I can't help saying to myself: 'How many loaves of bread this would buy for hungry waifs! how many pairs of shoes! how many lives it could save!' I see this big lawn all overrun with little newsboys and factory-girls and sick men and women."