"I dare say his poor old father and mother don't venture on that liberty;
I wish you had seen them ----"

"He has told me about them," says Margaret.

And Mrs. Carriswood's dismay was such that for a second she
simply gasped. Were things so far along that such confessions were made?
Tommy must be very confident to venture; it was shrewd, very shrewd,
to forestall Mrs. Carriswood's sure revelations--oh, Tommy was not
a politician for nothing!

"Besides," Margaret went on, with the same note of repressed
feeling in her voice, "his is a good family, if they have decayed;
his ancestor was Lord Fitzmaurice in King James's time."

"She takes HIM seriously too!" thought Mrs. Carriswood,
with inexpressible consternation; "what SHALL I say to her mother?"

Strange to say, perhaps, considering that she was so frankly
a woman of the world, her stub-bornest objection to Tommy was not
an objection of expediency. She had insensibly grown to take
his success for granted, like the rest of the Washington world;
he would be a governor, a senator, he might be--anything!
And he was perfectly presentable, now; no, it would be on
the whole an investment in the future that would pay well enough;
his parents would be awkward, but they were old people,
not likely to be too much _en evidence_.

Mrs. Carriswood, while not overjoyed, would not feel crushed
by such a match, but she did view what she regarded as Tommy's