Her eyes twinkled. “I was beginning to be afraid you didn’t bark, either,” she said.
His expression retired behind his eyeglass. “Nor do I, unless I’m bid.”
“I like to be talked to--I’d so much rather criticise than be criticised.”
“What do you like to hear about?” he asked.
“About the man who’s talking. It’s the only subject he’ll really put his heart into, isn’t it?”
Frothingham smiled faintly, as if greeting an old and not especially admired acquaintance.
“I’m so disappointed,” she said presently. “All winter I’ve had the same man take me in everywhere--you know, we follow precedence very closely here in Washington. And, when I found I was to have a new man, I had _such_ hopes. The other man and I had got bored to death with each other. And now--you’re threatening to be a failure!”
Frothingham did not like this--it was pert for a woman to speak thus to him; he resented it as a man and he resented it as Lord Frothingham. “That’s a jest, ain’t it?” he drawled. “We English, you know, have a horribly defective sense of American humour.”
“No, it wasn’t a jest,” she replied. “It was a rudeness, and I beg your pardon. I thought to say something smart, and--I missed. Let’s change the subject. Do you see that intellectual-looking man with the beard on the other side of the table--next to Ysobel Ballantyne?”
“Yes--and he’s surly because mamma has made a dreadful mistake. She’s put him two below the place his rank entitles him to. He’ll act like a savage all evening.”
“Fancy! What a small matter to fly into a rage over.”
“A small matter for a large man, but a large matter for a small man. Sometimes I think all men are small. They’re much vainer than women!”
“Because of what I’ve seen in Washington. They say the women started this craze for precedence. I don’t know whether that’s so or not. But I do know that in the three years I’ve been out I’ve found the men worse than the women. And those things look so much pettier in a man, too.”
“But I thought there wasn’t any rank in this country.”
“So I thought--I was educated in France. I believe in rank and all that--it seems to me absurd to talk about equality. But I despise this silly squabble over little places that last only a few years at most. As Mr. Boughton was saying--you know Mr. Boughton?”