. A modest creature who had paid
seventy-five dollars a month for a little flat let it for five
hundred a month for the duration of the war. A gorgeous Sultana
who had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment rented it
for a thousand dollars a month "for the duration." Marie Louise had
money enough, but she could hardly find anything that it would
buy.

She planned to secure a clerical post in some of the offices. She took
up shorthand and poked a typewriter and read books on system and
efficiency, then gave them up as Greek.

Once in a while she saw Ross Davidge. He suffered an intermittent
fever of hope and despondency. He, too, was trying to do his bit, but
he was lost in the maelstrom swirling through the channels of official
life. He would come to town for a few days, wait about, fuming, and
return in disgust to his shipyard. It was not altogether patriotism
that pulled him back to Washington. Marie Louise was there, and he
lost several appointments with the great folk he came to see, because
their hours clashed with Marie Louise's.

On one of his voyages he was surprised to find at his hotel an
invitation to dine at Mrs. Prothero's. Little as he knew of the
eminent ones of the fashionable world, he knew the famous name of
Prothero. He had spoken with reverence always of her late husband, one
of the rebuilders of the American navy, a voice crying in the
wilderness for a revival of the ancient glories of the merchant
marine. Davidge had never met him or his widow. He felt that he could
not refuse the unexplained opportunity to pay at least his respects to
the relict of his idol.

But he wondered by what means Mrs. Prothero, whom everybody had heard
of, had heard of him. When he entered her door on the designated
evening his riddle was answered.

The butler glanced at his card, then picked from a heap on the console
a little envelope which he proffered on his tray. The envelope was
about the size of those that new-born parents use to inclose the
proclamation of the advent of a new-born infant. The card inside
Davidge's envelope carried the legend, "Miss Webling."

The butler led him to the drawing-room door and announced him. There
indeed was Marie Louise, arm in arm with a majestic granddam in a
coronet of white hair.

Marie Louise put out her hand, and Davidge went to it. She clasped his
and passed it on to Mrs. Prothero with a character:

"This is the great Mr. Davidge, the shipwright."

Mrs.