“I presume it is the Alexandria excursion that the Beatouns were talking about yesterday,” she said, languidly. “He wants to show that young Irishman that we have a mild flavor of antiquity, ourselves. We are to see Alexandria and have a real old Virginian dinner, including one of the famous Beatoun hams and some of the '69 Chateau Yquem and the sacred '47 port. I suppose he will have the four-in-hand buckboard. 'A small party '--that will mean the Honorable Basil Sackville, Mrs. Beatoun, Lilly Denning, probably one of the Cabinet girls, Colonel Turner, and that young Russian Beatoun is so fond of, Tommy Fitzmaurice------” “Why do you always call Mr. Fitzmaurice Tommy?”--this interruption comes with a slight rise of color from young Margaret. “Everybody calls him Tommy in his own town; a politician as popular as he with the boys is naturally Tommy or Jerry or Billy. They slap him on the back or sit with an arm around his neck and concoct the ways to rule us.” “I don't think anyone slaps Mr. Fitzmaurice on the back and calls him Tommy, NOW,” says Margaret, with a little access of dignity. “I dare say his poor old father and mother don't venture on that liberty; I wish you had seen them----” “He has told me about them,” says Margaret. And Mrs. Carriswood's dismay was such that for a second she simply gasped. Were things so far along that such confessions were made? Tommy must be very confident to venture; it was shrewd, very shrewd, to forestall Mrs. Carriswood's sure revelations--oh, Tommy was not a politician for nothing! “Besides,” Margaret went on, with the same note of repressed feeling in her voice, “his is a good family, if they have decayed; his ancestor was Lord Fitzmaurice in King James's time.” “She takes HIM seriously too!” thought Mrs. Carriswood, with inexpressible consternation; “what SHALL I say to her mother?” Strange to say, perhaps, considering that she was so frankly a woman of the world, her stub-bornest objection to Tommy was not an objection of expediency. She had insensibly grown to take his success for granted, like the rest of the Washington world; he would be a governor, a senator, he might be--anything! And he was perfectly presentable, now; no, it would be on the whole an investment in the future that would pay well enough; his parents would be awkward, but they were old people, not likely to be too much _en evidence_.