The journalist shook his head. "It goes deeper than that. What we're looking on at is a complete transformation of the idea of marriage----"
A movement in the crowd bore the speaker away. The General was left watching the beautiful pair in the distance. They were apparently quite unconscious that they roused any special attention. Laughing and chatting like two children, they passed into the supper-room and disappeared.
Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however, knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like embarrassment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in the girl's dark eyes.
"I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me you went to the Senate."
Daphne looked him up and down. "Did I?" she said slowly. "I've forgotten. Will you move, please? There's someone bringing me an ice." And turning her back on Roger, she smiled and beckoned to the Under-Secretary, who with a triumphant face was making his way to her through the crowd.
Roger coloured hotly. "May I bring Mrs. Maddison?" he said, passing her; "she would like to talk to you about a party for next week----"
"Thank you. I am just going home." And with an energetic movement she freed herself from him, and was soon in the gayest of talk with the Under-Secretary.
The reception broke up some time after midnight, and on the way home General Hobson attempted a raid upon his nephew's intentions.
"I don't wish to seem an intrusive person, my dear Roger, but may I ask how much longer you mean to stay in Washington?"
The tone was short and the look which accompanied the words not without sarcasm. Roger, who had been walking beside his companion, still deeply flushed, in complete silence, gave an awkward laugh.
"And as for you, Uncle Archie, I thought you meant to sail a fortnight ago. If you've been staying on like this on my account----"
"Don't make a fool either of me or yourself, Roger!" said the General hastily, roused at last to speech by the annoyance of the situation. "Of course it was on your account that I have stayed on. But what on earth it all means, and where your affairs are--I'm hanged if I have the glimmer of an idea!"