Craig laughed, looking at Margaret. "Grant thinks that's a jest," said he. "Instead, it's the sober truth. I am engaged in keeping my Chief in order, and in preventing the President from skulking from the policies he has the shrewdness to advocate but lacks the nerve to put into action." Margaret stood looking after him as he strode away. "You mustn't mind his insane vanity," said Arkwright, vaguely uneasy at the expression of her hazel eyes, at once so dark, mysterious, melancholy, so light and frank and amused. "I don't," said she in a tone that seemed to mean a great deal. He, still more uneasy, went on: "A little more experience of the world and Josh'll come round all right--get a sense of proportion." "But isn't it true?" asked Margaret somewhat absently. "What?" "Why, what he said as he was leaving. Before you came he'd been here quite a while, and most of the time he talked of himself--" Arkwright laughed, but Margaret only smiled, and that rather reluctantly. "And he was telling how hard a time he was having; what with Stillwater's corruption and the President's timidity about really acting against rich, people--something about criminal suits against what he calls the big thieves--I didn't understand it, or care much about it, but it gave me an impression of Mr. Craig's power." "There IS some truth in what he says," Arkwright admitted, with a reluctance of which his pride, and his heart as well, were ashamed. "He's become a burr, a thorn, in the Administration, and they're really afraid of him in a way--though, of course, they have to laugh at him as every one else does." "Of course," said Margaret absently. Arkwright watched her nervously. "You seem to be getting round to the state of mind," said he, "where you'll be in danger of marrying our friend Craig." Margaret, her eyes carefully away from him, laughed softly--a disturbingly noncommittal laugh. "Of course, I'm only joking," continued Arkwright. "I know YOU couldn't marry HIM." "Why not?" "Because you don't think he's sincere." Her silence made him feel that she thought this as weak as he did. "Because you don't love him." "No, I certainly don't love him," said Margaret. "Because you don't even like him." "What a strange way of advocating your friend you have." Arkwright flushed scarlet. "I thought you'd quite dismissed him as a possibility," he stammered. "With a woman every man's a possibility so long as no man's a certainty." "Margaret, you couldn't marry a man you didn't like?" She seemed to reflect. "Not if I were in love with another at the time," she said finally. "That's as far as my womanly delicacy--what's left of it after my years in society--can influence me. And it's stronger, I believe, than the delicacy of most women of our sort."