“Very shabbily,” replied Crane, smiling; “he has driven me to the wall, but he will find me fighting with my back to the wall.” Then Constance introduced her companion, and it was Cathcart, after all. “You can’t expect much sympathy from me, Mr. Crane,” said Cathcart, smiling. “If it had not been for you and your colleagues I might have been in command of a ship at this moment, making a run for the Caribbean Sea. You did us naval men a bad turn by forcing those beggars to back down without striking a blow.” Cathcart, like all naval men, was eager to play the great game of war with the new implements lately acquired, and did not welcome the exercise of peaceful power which had forced an amicable arrangement of a dangerous question. Just then a handsome victoria drew up at the sidewalk. In it sat Mrs. Hill-Smith, the widowed daughter of the Secretary of State, and a beautifully dressed, high-bred-looking girl, Eleanor Baldwin. Baldwin, _père_, whose cards read, “Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin,” was the successful inventor of a machine for stitching shoes, which had brought him a great fortune early in life, and had enabled him to establish himself in Washington and adopt the rôle of a gentleman of leisure and of inherited fortune. His daughter looked like the younger sister of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, as Mrs. Hill-Smith, Cap’n Josh Slater’s granddaughter, looked like Lady Clara Vere de Vere herself. Mrs. Hill-Smith beckoned to Constance, who approached, leaving the two men a little distance away talking together under the overhanging branches of the tulip-trees. “My dear girl,” said Mrs. Hill-Smith, who had adopted the “dear girl” mode of addressing all women like herself over thirty-five, “you must come to the meeting of the Guild for Superannuated Governesses, which is to be organised at my house to-morrow. It is a branch of the one presided over in London by the Princess Christian”--and Mrs. Hill-Smith ran over glibly a number of names of ladies of the diplomatic corps in Washington who were interested in it, winding up with, “And we _can’t_ get on without you.” Constance Maitland’s full gaze had in it power over women as well as over men, and Mrs. Hill-Smith was not quite certain whether there was a laugh or not in Constance’s deep, dark eyes, as turning them on her she replied: “Very well--but my first proposition will be revolutionary, I warn you. I shall suggest that we pay governesses enough to enable them to save something, and thus we can get hold of the economic problem by the head instead of by the tail.” Was she really in earnest? Mrs. Hill-Smith did not know, but there was certainly a flippancy in Constance’s tone which shocked both Mrs. Hill-Smith and Miss Baldwin. The serious, hard-working women by whom they were mothered and grandmothered had given them a deadly soberness and energy in the pursuit of social schemes and pleasures, just as their forbears had industriously and seriously washed and baked and brewed.