'Elberforce Jenkins.'
'Hm!' said Madame, and raised the paper.
An electric bell rang.
Cicely came back into the room; stood by a large bowl of roses;
considered them.
The butler passed through the wide hall. A voice sounded in the
distance. The butler appeared.
'Mr Henry Calverly calling,' he said.
Madame Watt raised her head so abruptly that her glasses fell, brought
up with a jerk at the end of a thin gold chain, and swung there.
Cicely stood motionless by the roses.
The Senator glanced up, then shifted his cigar and resumed his study of
the financial page.
'You will hardly----' began Madame.
'Show him into the drawing-room,' said Cicely with dignity.
The butler wavered.
Then, as if to settle all such small difficulties, Henry himself
appeared behind him, smiling naively, eagerly.
Cicely hurried forward. Her quick smile came, and the little bob of her
head.
'How do you do?' she said brightly. 'Mr Calverly--my aunt, Madame Watt!
And my uncle, Senator Watt!'
Madame Watt arose, deliberately, not without a solid sort of majesty.
She was a presence; no other such ever appeared in Sunbury. She fixed an
uncompromising gaze on Henry.
So uncompromising was it that Cicely covered her embarrassment by moving
hurriedly toward the drawingroom, with a quick:--
'Come right in here.'
There was no one living on this erratic earth who could have cowed Henry
on this Saturday evening. A week later, yes. But not to-night. He never
even suspected that Madame meant to cow him. In such moments as these
(and there were a good many of them in his life) Henry was incapable of
perceiving hostility toward himself. The disaster that on Tuesday had
seemed the end of the world was to-night a hazy memory of another epoch.
There were few grown or half-grown persons in Sunbury that were not
thinking on this evening of the meanest scandal in the known history of
the town and, incidentally, among others involved, of Henry Calverly;
but Henry himself was of those few.
He marched straight on Madame with cordial smile and outstretched hand.
He wrung the hand of the impassive Senator.