“I’d send Grace Mandon in ahead of the Speaker’s wife, if I were you,” replied Mrs. Ballantyne. “I’ve no patience with the pretensions of the House. It’s distinctly the commonest branch of the Government, while the Cabinet is next to the President.”
“But,” objected Mrs. Pope plaintively, “the Speaker is _so_ influential and really fierce about precedence, and his wife has _such_ a tongue and _such_ a temper, and neither he nor she _ever_ forgives.”
“Do as you like, of course,” said Mrs. Ballantyne stiffly. Being of the Senate it exasperated her that the House should be placed ahead of it.
Just then a murmur ran around the room--“The President! The President!” Those who were seated rose, conversation stopped, and the orchestra began to play. “Bless my soul,” muttered Frothingham, “they’re playing ‘God Save the King’!” And then he remembered that the Americans had, as he put it, “stolen our tune and set a lot of rot about themselves to it.” The President and his wife entered, he frowning and red and intent upon the two gilt chairs. Mrs. Pope curtsied, her husband contracted his stiff old figure in a comical half-salaam. All bent their heads and a few of the young people, among them Ysobel, curtsied.
“See him looking at those chairs?” said she to Frothingham.
“He’s awfully sour at the etiquette here,” she went on. “I suppose he’s afraid the country’ll find out about it and cut up rough. He’s smashing right and left, and everyone’s wondering when he’ll throw out the gilt chairs.”
But his courage apparently failed him, for he and his wife advanced to the “thrones” and seated themselves. No one else sat, the men moving about to get the partners indicated on the little gilt-edged crested cards they had found in envelopes addressed to them and laid upon the tables in the coat-rooms. Frothingham examined Elsie Pope and saw that she was small and slight, square in the shoulders, thin in the neck, her hair of an uncertain shade of brown, her eyes commonplace, her features irregular. “She looks a good-tempered soul,” he said to himself, searching resolutely for merits. And then he noted that her hands were red, and that she had flat, rather wide wrists. “A good, plain soul,” he added. He sat silent, waiting for her to begin to entertain him--he hadn’t got used to the American custom of the men entertaining the women; and the New York and Boston women, acquainted with the British way, had humoured him. But he waited in vain. At last he stole a glance at her, and noted a gleam in the corner of her eye, the flutter of a humour-curve at the corner of her mouth. “A shrewd little thing, I suspect,” he thought. And he said to her, “No--really, I don’t bite.”