Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade, to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees, and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone and hooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses Lewis's school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though he had recognized the picture's truth, he was ashamed of it, and had denied it altogether. When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood, there was an instant's constraint, born of Garwood's uneasiness in women's society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily's solicitude that her lover should meet the approval of her friend. Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she rather coldly said: "You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah Gahwood?" "I'm running for Congress, if that's what you mean," replied Garwood with an uncontrollable bluntness that he regretted. "Oh, yes; that is what you call it, isn't it? How int'resting you must find it!" Garwood laughed in an effort to find ease. "I find it pretty hard work," he sighed. Emily noted the sigh, and pressed the hand she somehow found between them. "He's all worn out, Dade," she explained, and the sense of possession her tone implied put all three on an easier footing. "You don't know how hard our political leaders have to work." "To be elected?" asked Dade. "Yes, to be elected," said Garwood, yielding himself to the pillows that were piled near him. "And no sooner are we elected once than we have to begin fixing up our fences for a second term." "Fixing up yoah fences?" said Dade, wonderingly. "It's a political phrase," explained Emily. "You have so many of them," said Dade, "and they ah all so unintelligible." "They must strike a foreigner as peculiar," said Garwood. "I had never thought of that before." "But I'm not a fo'eigneh, you know," the girl protested. "Well, you're pretty near it," said Emily. "She's lived abroad all her life, you know--nearly," she explained aside to Garwood. Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all men must who are not versed in the banalities of women's intercourse, though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men's gossip.