"Good! Perhaps Mildred can be there."
"Fine!" His voice wavered. He was trapped. He had not guessed that the club would have an annex. The Senator felt the constraint across the wire. It hurt him, but he laughed.
"Cheer up! Maybe she can't come!"
"Oh, I—I hope she can. She's—I'd love to see her, I assure you."
"All right. Don't worry. Good-by."
The Senator was laughing, but there was a wounded pride in his voice. Forbes hung up the telephone, feeling a cad and an ingrate.
CHAPTER XLV
THE next forenoon, having obtained the privilege of absence, Forbes crossed from Governor's Island to Manhattan Island, took the Subway from South Ferry to Fifty-ninth Street, and, entering Central Park, kept along its southernmost path till he reached the Plaza, where he paused a moment to admire Saint-Gaudens' statue of General Sherman, a gilded warrior on a gilded horse squired by a gilded girl—Victory or Peace or something, he was not sure just what.
In his present humor of misogyny he wondered why it was thought to be necessary to put a woman in everything. Of all the campaigns where she was lacking, surely the March to the Sea was among her most conspicuous absences. But he admired the lean warrior with the doffed hat and the splendid stride of the big horse—a very different horse from the Park horses he found, with their tan-clad grooms clustered at the mounting-blocks near by.