As she looked at all those great men, and looked at Jerome, thinking how much more handsome he was than they, she projected her thought to the time when he would be a senator from Illinois and they would appear together in the Senate restaurant, in their turn to be pointed out. The pleasing sense of distinction was already with her, because of the company they were in, though Emily had speedily learned that most congressmen in Washington go about unnoticed, and that not all of the senators are known by sight.
"Not until the cartoonists take them up," Jerome had explained to her.
"You'll go splendidly in a cartoon!" she said, enthusiastically.
"Would I?" he rejoined. "Well, that's hardly a compliment. You know, the cartoons are all hateful, outrageously hateful--at least, the good ones. Those that praise are always absurd and flat."
As they were finishing their luncheon, three men came in and took a table across the room. When Garwood saw them he bowed, and some signal evidently passed between them, for Garwood excused himself for an instant from his wife, and went over to join them, leaning over their table to whisper for a moment. When he came back he said:
"Em, I'm awfully sorry, but I find I shall be detained here at the Capitol for about half an hour. We have a meeting of a subcommittee I'm on. I'm awfully sorry," he added as he saw her face fall, "but if you can go back to the hotel--I'll put you on the car--I'll join you there at two."
He led her down the hall past the Senate post-office, then out to New Jersey Avenue, where he put her on the car that took her back to the lonesome little hotel.
It was long past midnight when he rejoined her there.
Emily sat at her window, across which the rain slanted dismally into the street below. Jerome lay in bed sleeping still, though it was now nearly noon. He slept hard after his labors on the subcommittee, and she had sent the nurse with the baby to patrol the long hallway, in order that the child might not awaken his father, and she had gone about herself noiselessly, to the same end. She had tried to read, but could not. She had fancied a long letter to Dade Emerson, describing her Washington trip, but the enthusiasm she had imagined for this letter, the first in a long while in which she had anything to relate that would compare with the letters Dade was able to write, colored as they were with the picturesqueness of Old World travel, could not that morning ring true.