“What did they ask you, Emily?”
“Everything, to the remotest detail. They wanted to know how I met him and I gave them the letter he had written me. They wanted a description of him, height and weight and so on, which it's so difficult to remember. They wanted a list of the persons he had been introduced to at my home; they were much disturbed because I couldn't remember them all. You know how many persons I entertain — and I don't keep records.”
“Did you give them my name?” asked Beauty, quickly.
“I'm happy to say I realized in time how that might point the ringer at the Crillon.”
“Oh, thank you, Emily — thank you! Lanny's whole future might depend on it!” Beauty got herself together, and then rattled on: “Such an incredible idea, Emily! Do you really suppose it can be true?” A woman doesn't spend many years in fashionable society without learning how to conceal her emotions, or at any rate to give them a turn in a new direction.
“I don't know what to think, Beauty. What could a German be trying to do now? Blow up the Peace Conference with a bomb?”
“Didn't you tell me that M. Dalcroze talked a great deal about the evils of the blockade?”
“Yes; but it's no crime to do that, is it?”
“It would be for a German, I suppose. The French would probably shoot him for it.”
“Oh, how sick I am of this business of killing people! I hear there were several hundred killed and wounded in those May Day riots. The papers don't give us the truth about anything any more!” The kind Mrs. Emily, whose hair had turned snow-white under the stress of war, went on to philosophize about the psychology of the French. They were suffering from shellshock. It was to be hoped that when this treaty was signed they would settle down and become their normal selves. “If they have the League of Nations to protect them — and surely it can't be possible that the American Congress will reject such a great and beneficent plan!”