Carol prepared to leave.

On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric
Valour.

She was startled, incredulous, then wretched.  Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg.

He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly.  She speculated, “I could have made so much of him——­” She did not finish her speculation.

She went home and read Kennicott’s letters.  They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room.

IV

Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington.  When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him.  She was glad that he had made the decision himself.

She had leave from the office for two days.

She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident—­he was such a bulky person to handle.  They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, “You’re looking fine; how’s the baby?” and “You’re looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?”

He grumbled, “I don’t want to butt in on any plans you’ve made or your friends or anything, but if you’ve got time for it, I’d like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while.”

She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie.

“Like the new outfit?  Got ’em in Chicago.  Gosh, I hope they’re the kind you like.”

They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh.  She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again.

As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster.  There was a recent cut on his chin.  He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington.

It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant.

She realized that he was slightly more bald.  The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her.  She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine.

“You’d like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn’t you?” she said.

It was the one thing he had planned.  He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do.