The Senator laughed a little constrainedly, saying that he guessed they couldn't deny the soft impeachment, but that their defense was in the attractiveness of the other sex. Mrs. Greuze put in a graceful word which had the effect to switch the conversation gently to another track without perceptible jar, and the conference was soon at an end. Out in the corridor with the door of the committee-room safely closed, they gathered excitedly around Mrs. Pennybacker. "Well! What is it? What have I done?" she demanded. "Oh!" groaned Mrs. Greuze, "you've killed us _dead_! We'll never recover from this. Don't you know that is exactly what he did? Married a girl younger than his daughter--and in less than a year!" Mrs. Pennybacker's jaw dropped. "I ought not to have come," she said. "I told you I would be sure to say something! You ought not to have _let_ me come." Then her ever-present sense of humor came to her relief. "Well, there's one comfort. It was the truth! And he got it straight!" CHAPTER XXXVI MARGARET'S RESOLVE While Mrs. Pennybacker was thus effectively wielding the battle-ax that common sense and observation had laid ready at her hand, Margaret, bleeding on the field, was well-nigh ready to give up the fight. An ambushed foe had fallen upon her and borne her down, and before she could recover herself, Courage, who had been through it all her strong support and chiefest counselor, had turned craven and fled. While this fitly, though inadequately, describes the girl's condition of mind as she sat in the car swiftly traversing the short distance between Elmhurst and Washington, there was nothing in her outward appearance to indicate that it was so. The occupants in that parlor-car saw in Margaret a well-dressed, quiet-appearing young woman, remarkable for nothing perhaps but the pronounced beauty of her face and her rather queenly carriage. It was a mild surprise to see a woman of this type get on at a way station. As she sat intently looking out of the window at the moving panorama of winter trees seen now to best advantage stripped of their summer garments, one might have thought her a devotee of Nature, with an eye and heart single to that alone. But the oaks and the elms and the lesser folk of the tree-world were in reality making an impression on a retina as unseeing as though back of it there were no brain. This quiet, self-contained looking lady looking out at the wintry landscape with such apparent appreciation was saying to herself in the abandon of despair, "Is it true? Can it be true?"