“Could I say ‘no’ to that?” He radiated satisfaction. “Do you know how charming you are, Jane?”
“Am I? But it is nice of you to go. I know how you’ll hate it.”
“Not if you are there. And now, who else are asked?”
“Oh, Mrs. Laramore and Eloise Harper and a lot of others. Lucy says she’ll be like a fish out of water, but Delafield has made up his mind that his friends shan’t think that he’s ashamed of her.”
When their ices came and their coffee, Frederick said, “I’ve got to spend a half-hour in a committee room. Shall I take you up to the Senate Gallery?”
“No--there’s nothing interesting, is there? I’ll wait in Statuary Hall.”
Jane loved the marble figures that circled the Hall. Years ago there had not been so many. They had been, then, perhaps, more distinctive. As a child, she had chosen as her favorites the picturesque Colonials, the frontiersmen in leather tunics and coonskin caps. She had never liked the statesmen in stiff shirts and frock coats, although she had admitted their virtues. Even the incongruous classic draperies were more in keeping with the glamour which the past flung over the men who had given their best to America.
But it was Fulton who had captured her imagination, with his little ship, and Pere Marquette with his cross, the peace-loving Quaker who had conquered; adventurer, pioneer, priest and prophet--builders all of the structure of the new world.
She wondered what future generations would add to this glorious company. Would the Anglo-Saxon give way to the Semite? Would the Huguenot yield to the Slav? And would these newcomers hold high the banner of national idealism? What would they give? And what would they take away?
There were groups of sightseers gathered about the great room--a guide placing them here and there on the marble blocks. The trick was to put someone behind a mottled pillar far away, and let him speak. Owing to some strange acoustic quality the sound would be telephoned to the person who stood on the whispering stone.
Years ago Jane had listened while a voice had come echoing across the hollow spaces of the great Hall, “My country--right or wrong--my country----”
Another ghost! The ghost of a boy, patriotic, passionately devoted to the great old gods. “Of course they were only men, Jane. Human. Faulty. But they blazed a path of freedom for those who followed....”