To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt refusals.  But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city.  The mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their absence, were just as keen.  But now Patricia confessed to a restless longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.

“Only you mustn’t consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount,” she protested.  “I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already interfered shamefully with your autumn plans.  You are simply too kind and too hospitable to admit it.”

“You have interfered with nothing,” was the ready assurance.  “We were not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere.  No inducement that was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a political year, and your coming has been a blessing.  But for the good excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening gun to the day after election.  But that isn’t what I meant to say.  You are tired of so much country; I can read the call of the city in your eyes—­and they are very pretty eyes, my dear.  Shall I telephone the senator that we are coming in this afternoon to stay a while?”

“I shall be delighted,” said Patricia, and the eyes, which were not only pretty but exceedingly apt to tell tales, confirmed the eager assent.  Then she added:  “Now that daddy has his box of books from the university library, I doubt if he will know that we are gone.”

On their first day in the capital Evan was away, but he returned the following morning and Mrs. Blount promptly captured him for a theatre box-party which she was inviting for the same evening.  In Mrs. Honoria’s orderly scheme Blount was predestined to go, though he was allowed to believe that his acceptance was of free will.  Notwithstanding the lapse of time and Mrs. Honoria’s uniform kindness, he was still unreasonably prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin to jealousy.  It was evident that Patricia’s admiration for his father extended over to his father’s wife; and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike her, too.

The box-party proved to be a more formal affair than he had anticipated, since it was large enough to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes.  Gantry was included, and so were the Weatherfords—­father, mother, daughters, and son.  These, with the Gordons and a Denver man whose name of Critchett Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria’s list.  In the seating Blount meant to make sure of having a measurably undisturbed evening with Patricia.  But fate, or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found himself cornered between Mrs. Weatherford and her younger daughter, with the square-shouldered “Paramounter” candidate for governor strengthening the barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.