Vetch laughed without replying directly to her question.  “Did she say that?” he responded.  “And what did she mean by it, I wonder?”

“It sounded clever,” said Patty, “but I didn’t understand.  What is a forum, Father?”

Vetch thought a moment.  “Mrs. Page would probably tell you,” he replied, “that it is the temple of the improbable.”

Patty stirred impatiently.  “Now you are trying to talk like Mrs. Page,” she rejoined.  “I wish I knew what things meant.”

“When you find out what they mean, Patty, they will cease to interest you.”

“Well, I’d rather be less interested and more comfortable,” said Patty, with a trace of exasperation in her voice.  “To-night, for instance, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to behave.  Look at all those books I’ve read, too, when I might just as well have been enjoying myself.  I’ve found out to-night, Father, that books can’t tell you everything—­not even books on etiquette.”

Vetch broke into a laugh of boisterous amusement.  “So that is how you have been spending your time!” he exclaimed.  “You’d better trust to your common sense, my dear; it will carry you straighter.”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t.  It doesn’t carry me anywhere except into trouble.  When I think of all the pains I’ve taken to learn how to talk like the dictionary!  Why, nobody talks like the dictionary any longer!  They all talk slang, every one of them—­only they don’t talk the kind that Julius Gershom and all these politicians do.  If you could have seen Mrs. Berkeley’s face when I told her I’d had a ‘grand’ time to-night—­she looked exactly like a frozen fish—­though just the moment before Mr. Culpeper had called somebody a ‘rotter’.  I heard him.”

The Governor dismissed it all with a wave of his hand.  “Trifles, trifles,” was his only comment.

The car had entered the Square, and in a moment it was passing the Washington statue and the Capitol building.  Until it stopped before the steps of the mansion, Patty did not reply; then springing up with a flutter of her scarlet skirt, she exclaimed airily, “But I am a trifle, too, Father!”

As he held out his hand from the ground, Vetch looked at her with an expression in which pride and pity were strangely mingled.  “Then you are one of the trifles that make life worth living,” he replied.

He had taken out his latch-key and was about to insert it in the lock, when the door opened and Gershom stood before them.

“I waited for you,” he said to Vetch.  “There’s a matter I must see you about to-night.”  His ruddy face was tinged with purple, and he had the look of a man who has just been aroused from a nap.

“Well, I’m sleepy, and I’m going to bed,” retorted Patty in reply to his glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.

“Then I’ll see you to-morrow.”  He had followed her into the wide hall while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat.  “Did you have a good time?”