"Indeed!" exclaimed Miss Greene. "I am sure her appearance must have been a very convincing argument." She gave her opponent another searching glance. Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop was having difficulty in getting her breath.
"We have been having a taste of lobbying, Miss Greene," she began, "and-"
"How unpleasant!" said she.
"You know, possibly," said Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop, regaining something of her position.
"Indeed I do," Miss Greene a.s.sented sweetly, "but where it is in the line of one"s profession, duty obscures the unpleasantness. One can not, you know, always choose one"s occupation. Good morning!"
And catching her skirts, with a smile and a bow she left.
The successful lobbyists stood in silence a moment, looked one to another with wide and staring eyes. Then at last Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop spoke.
"Morley," she said, "I do wish you could learn to discriminate in your introductions."
XV
IN the evening, just before dinner, Amelia and Vernon sat in the little waiting room of the hotel. Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop and her ladies had gone up to the suite they had taken and were engaged in repairing the toilets their political labors of the day had somewhat damaged. Amelia had completed her toilet more quickly than they and had joined Vernon, waiting for her below.
They sat in the dim little room where Amelia could look across the corridor to the elevator, expecting every moment the coming of Mrs.
Overman Hodge-Lathrop. Now that they found themselves alone and face to face with the necessity of reconciliation, a constraint had fallen on them. Amelia constantly kept her eye on the elevator. Men were pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing the open door, going to or coming from the bar-room, and their loud talk and laughter beat in waves into the dim little retreat of the lovers.
As Vernon sat there he imagined that all that talk was of him; more than all, that all that laughter was at him-though there was no more of either than there was every evening when the legislators came over to the hotel for dinner. At last Amelia turned to him.
"You"ve got the blues, haven"t you?" she said. It would seem that somehow he did her an injustice by having the blues.
"No," he answered.
"Then what"s the matter?" she demanded.
Vernon glanced at her, and his glance carried its own reproach.
"Oh!" she said, as if suddenly recalling a trivial incident. "Still worrying about that?"
"Well," Vernon answered, "it has some seriousness for me."
Amelia, sitting properly erect, her hands folded in her lap, twisted about and faced him.
"You don"t mean, Morley, that you are sorry it didn"t pa.s.s, do you?"
"It puts me in rather an awkward position," he said. "I suppose you know that."
"I don"t see how," Amelia replied.
"Well," Vernon explained, "to stand for a measure of that importance, and then at the final, critical moment, to fail-"
"Oh, I see!" said Amelia, moving away from him on the couch. "Of course, if you regret the _time_, if you"d rather have been over in the Senate than to have been with _me_-why, of course!" She gave a little deprecating laugh.
Vernon leaned impulsively toward her.
"But, dear," he said, "you don"t understand!"
"And after your begging me to come down to Springfield to see you!"
Amelia said. Her eyes were fixed on the elevator, and just at that moment the car came rushing down the shaft and swished itself to a stop just when, it seemed, it should have shattered itself to pieces at the bottom. The elevator boy clanged the iron door back, and Maria Greene stepped out.
"There she is now!" said Amelia, raising her head to see. Miss Greene paused a moment to reply to the greeting of some one of the politicians who stopped to speak to her.
Amelia"s nose was elevated.
"And so that"s the wonderful hair you all admire so much, is it?" she said.
"Well," replied Vernon, almost defiantly, "don"t you think it is rather exceptional hair?"
Amelia turned on him with a look of superior and pitying penetration.
"Does that shade deceive you?" she asked. She smiled disconcertingly, as she looked away again at Maria Greene. The woman lawyer was just leaving the politicians.
"And to think of wearing that hat with that hair!" Amelia went on.
"Though of course," she added with deep meaning, "it may originally have been the right shade; the poor hat can"t be expected to change its color."
Vernon had no answer for her.
"I wonder what explanation she"ll have for her defeat," said Amelia in a tone that could not conceal its spirit of triumph.
"I"m not worried about that," said Vernon. "I"m more concerned about the explanation I"ll have."
"Dearest!" exclaimed Amelia, swiftly laying her hand on his. Her tone had changed, and as she leaned toward him with the new tenderness that her new manner exhaled, Vernon felt a change within himself, and his heart swelled.
"Dearest," she said, in a voice that hesitated before the idea of some necessary reparation, "are you really so badly disappointed?"
He looked at her, then suddenly he drew her into his arms, and she let her head rest for an instant on his shoulder; but only for an instant.
Then she exclaimed and was erect and all propriety.
"You forget where we are, dear," she said.
"I don"t care about that," he replied, and then glancing swiftly about in all directions, he kissed her.
"Morley!" she cried, and her cheeks went red, a new and happy red.
They sat there, looking at each other.
"You didn"t consider, you didn"t _really_ consider her pretty, did you?"
Amelia asked.