I'm late to
dinner."

She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.

Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever
into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of
the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name.
This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away
before he could overtake her.

Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss
Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall
pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a
forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women,
too.

The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly
with the Teutonic _r_. Davidge studied him and began to remember him.
He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind,
ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of
Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's
home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for
anybody he hates.

He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting
after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious.
But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and
turning a tired business man into a restless swain.

Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as
an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of
some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic
accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew
of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German
accent. An icy fear chilled him.

His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness
that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had
exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a
governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no gratitude,
and endless trouble.

Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part:

"Can she be one of those horrible women who have many lovers? Is she a
woman of affairs? What is all this mystery about her? What was she so
afraid of the night she would not stop at Mrs. Widdicombe's? Why was
she so upset by the appearance of Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why was she in
such a hurry to get me away from Mrs. Prothero's dinner, and to keep
me from keeping my