“If anybody else should say a thing like that, I’d blush and call it a compliment,” he retorted.  Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the passing moment.

“It wasn’t meant for a compliment,” she returned, with the straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day.  “Consider a moment.  You come to me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I am beginning to get interested we are interrupted.  In the morning, at some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you for weeks and weeks.  What have you been doing?”

“I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make other people practise it.”

“You have been successful?” she asked quickly.

“Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me.  As to the other, I don’t know.  Sometimes I’m credulous enough to believe that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and at other times I’m afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead me.  Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the ‘practical-politics’ armory to get my weapons.”

There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.

“And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?”

He shook his head despondently.  “No; or rather yes.  I might say that I am coming to understand him—­or his methods—­only too well.  The only way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are together.”

“I am sorry,” she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone.  “As I have said before, you don’t understand him.  You are judging him by standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarly your own standards.  I know you can be broad for others when you try.  Can’t you be broad for him?”

It was good to hear her defend his father.  It was what he would have wished his wife to do.  Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.

“Let us say that the fault is mine,” he interposed hastily.  “God forbid that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any respect.”

“You couldn’t do that, Evan.  He is simply a grand old man—­the first I have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made,” she asserted warmly.  “If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more than gigantic virtues—­the faults of a man who is too strong and too magnanimous to be little in any respect.”

The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator, Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the marriageable daughters, were at the cafe door waiting for the laggards.  Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.