ked up quickly.

"I hope it'll be the right man, Mrs. Verrier. Of course, with anyone
so--so clever--and so used to managing everything for herself--one would
be a little anxious."

Mrs. Verrier's expression changed. A kind of
wildness--fanaticism--invaded it, as of one recalling a mission. "Oh,
well, nothing is irrevocable nowadays," she said, almost with violence.
"Still I hope Daphne won't make a mistake."

Mrs. Phillips looked at her companion, at first in astonishment. Then a
change passed over her face. With a cold excuse she left Mrs. Verrier
alone.

CHAPTER IV

The reception at the White House was being given in honour of the
delegates to a Peace Congress. The rooms were full without being
inconveniently crowded and the charming house opened its friendly doors
to a society more congruous and organic, richer also in the nobler kind
of variety than America, perhaps, can offer to her guests elsewhere.
What the opera and international finance are to New York, politics and
administration are, as we all know, to Washington. And the visitor
from Europe, conversationally starved for want of what seem to him
the only topics worth discussing, finds himself within hearing once
more of ministers, cabinets, embassies, and parliamentary gossip.
Even General Hobson had come to admit that--especially for the
middle-aged--Washington parties were extremely agreeable. The young and
foolish might sigh for the flesh-pots of New York; those on whom "the
black ox had trodden," who were at all aware what a vast tormenting,
multitudinous, and headstrong world man has been given to inhabit; those
who were engaged in governing any part of that world, or meant some day
to be thus engaged; for them Washington was indispensable, and New York
a mere entertainment.

Moreover Washington, at this time of the world's history, was the scene
of one of those episodes--those brisker moments in the human
comedy--which every now and then revive among us an almost forgotten
belief in personality, an almost forgotten respect for the mysteries
behind it. The guests streaming through the White House defiled past a
man who, in a level and docketed world, appeared to his generation as
the reincarnation of forces primitive, over-mastering, and heroic. An
honest Odysseus!--toil-worn and storm-beaten, yet still with the spirit
and strength, the many devices, of a boy; capable like his prototype in
one short day of crushing his enemies, upholding