"Why run such a risk?" said I. "I'm sure your own hair done as your maid can do it would be far more becoming." Mrs. Burke was delighted. "I might have known better," she observed, "but I found Mr. Burke bottling his beard, and he wanted me to; and it seemed to me that somehow bottled hair just fitted right in with all the rest of this foolishness here. How they would rear round at home if they knew what kind of a place Washington is! Why, I hear that up at the White House, when the President leaves the table for a while during meals, all the ladies—women, I mean—his wife and all of them, have to rise and stand till he comes back." "Yes," I replied. "He's started that custom. I like ceremony, don't you?" [Pg 49]"No, I can't say that I do," she drawled. "Out home all the drones and pokes and nobodies are just crazy about getting out in feathers and red plush aprons and clanking and pawing round, trying to make out they're somebody. And I've always noticed that whenever anybody that is a somebody hankers after that sort of thing it's because he's got a streak of nobody in him. No, I don't like it in Cal Walters out home, and I don't like it in the President." [Pg 49] "We've got to do as the other capitals do," said I. "Naturally, as we get more and more ambassadors, and a bigger army, and the President more powerful, we become like the European courts. And the President is simply making a change abruptly that'd have to come gradually anyhow." Her eyes began to twinkle. "First[Pg 50] thing you know, the country'll turn loose a herd of steers from the prairies in this town, and—But, long as it's here, I suppose I've got to abide by it. So I'll do whatever you say. It'll be a poor do, without my trying to find fault." [Pg 50] And she's being as good as her word. She makes me tell her exactly what to do. She is so beautifully simple and ladylike in her frank confessions of her ignorance—just as the Queen of England would be if she were to land on the planet Mars and have to learn the ways—the surface ways, I mean. I've no doubt that outside of a few frills which silly people make a great fuss about, a lady is a lady from one end of the universe to the other. I'm making the rounds of my friends with Mrs. Burke in this period of waiting for the season to begin. And she[Pg 51] sits mum and keeps her eyes moving. She's rapidly picking up the right way to say things—that
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