"Isn't he fahn?" she said. "He's handsome, too. Ah heahd him make his great speech the night befo' he was elected--yo' heahd of it, didn't yo'?"
Beck only smiled. She turned again to listen, but her attention was not steadfast. Beck had hardly been listening at all.
"Don't yo' think him fahn?" she inquired.
"He is really a good speaker," the lieutenant admitted. Dade looked at him, fixing her brown eyes steadily in his blue ones.
"What do yo' all know abaout him?" she asked suddenly.
"Yo' speak so strangely--yo' ah so queah abaout him."
"Am I? I know nothing. I have been told that he came here two or three years ago with extraordinary prospects--"
"And he has not--justifahd or fulfilled them?"
"Well, if that's all!" Dade said loyally, tossing her head, and then she turned once more to watch Garwood.
His speech was brief. He finished in a fine burst of eloquence, with a hand uplifted, and his black locks shaking, and then sat down, amid a volley of applause, taking the hands of those who pressed about him, and smiling at each congratulatory word, though disparagingly, as if his achievement had been a small thing for him.
"Ah must meet him!" Dade announced, suddenly arising. "We'll go. Yo' must send in yo' cahd. Can yo'? Will they let yo'?"
"But what?" Dade stood at her full height.
"I think you'd rather not see him--here."
"Nonsense!" She stamped her foot petulantly, and her eyes flashed dangerously. "Ah mean to take him to task fo' not calling on mamma and me. Ah've known him all my life!"
The officer shrugged his shoulders. He felt that he had already said too much, more, certainly, than was prudent for an officer in the army, where feudal notions of propriety still exist.
Garwood came out of the House in response to the lieutenant's card. The air of serious and official demeanor with which he had prepared to listen to importunities about some of the army's constant appropriation bills or reorganization bills, relaxed into one of surprise and friendliness when he saw Dade standing by the side of the young officer, and it expanded into a smile of much insinuation as he bowed low and took the girl's hand.
She presented the lieutenant, and the men bowed.
"I've met Lieutenant Beck before," Garwood said. "Glad to meet him again--always glad to meet the officers of our little army, aren't we, Miss Dade?"