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Senator Fry asks.
    “She just smiles,” Kitty replies.
    “She would,” says Senator Fry.
    “Yes,” says Lady Maudulayne.
    At this point Clarence Wannamaker rears to a sitting position and begins some really scientific cursing. Hal Fry hangs up with best wishes to Lord Maudulayne and Raoul Barre, after briefly considering and then rejecting as useless the idea of probing to find out what those two astute and self-possessed allies think about the Leffingwell nomination. They will all be at the party at Dolly’s in Rock Creek Park tonight, he reflects, and perhaps there will be some inkling there. More than one crisis has been solved at Vagaries, that great white house amid the dark green trees, and possibly this one will be too, although he rather doubts it. He remembers as he pushes away the phone and lapses back for another half hour’s sleep that the Indian Ambassador, Krishna Khaleel, will be there, too. Much more to the point than Henry Lytle with his querulous wonder about “What will the Isaraelis do?” the senior Senator from West Virginia wonders what “K.K.” and the Asians will do. Given the state of the world, the answer to that may really be of some consequence.
    Also in the fabled city with the topless towers as it roars awake with an animal vigor Washington will never know are its senior Senator, Irving Steinman, quietly breakfasting in his apartment on East Eighty-second Street, and the junior Senator from Wyoming, Fred Van Ackerman, sleeping peacefully at the Roosevelt in the rosy afterglow of a mammoth rally of the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce (COMFORT) in Madison Square Garden.
    Farther north, in Franconia, the news comes to Courtney Robinson, symbol of that smaller but bothersome Senate group the Majority Leader privately classifies as Problems, as he stands before the mirror in the downstairs hall knotting his string tie around his high, old-fashioned collar. “Courtney isn’t much,” Blair Sykes of Texas is fond of pointing out about the senior Senator from New Hampshire, “but by God, he sure does look like a Senator!” This fact, Courtney’s major contribution to his times, is the result of care, not accident; and now as he knots the tie just so, settles the collar just so, puts on the long gray swallow-tailed coat, shrugs into the sealskin overcoat with the velvet lapels, takes the big outsize hat and cane from the table, gives a pat to the dirty-yellow-gray locks at the nape of his neck, and carefully puts a hothouse rose in his buttonhole, there is no doubt that the day is going to see one more smashing production of Courtney Robinson, U.S.S. Across his mind there passes a momentary genuine annoyance with the President for having created such a mess as naming Bob Leffingwell to State is almost certainly going to be, but the thought is presently dismissed as he gives himself a last approving inspection and prepares to go in town for a little politickin’. He’s speakin’ to Rotary at noon, and mebbe they’ll want to know what he thinks of the Leffin’well nomination. Doesn’t think much of it, does Courtney Robinson; doesn’t think much, period.
    There are those who do, however, and in the Washington suburb of Spring Valley, in the comfortable home where the telephone has been ringing incessantly for the past half hour, the senior Senator from Illinois lifts the receiver once more and prepares to give the same answer he has already given to four other newsmen:
    “I haven’t reached a final decision on this matter and don’t expect to until all the facts are in. At the moment, however, I am inclined to oppose the nomination.”
    But it is not another reporter who is calling Orrin Knox this time, it is the senior Senator from Utah. Brigham Anderson’s voice, courteous and kind as always, is troubled and concerned, and Senator Knox can visualize exactly the worried look on his handsome young face.
    “Orrin,” Brig says in his direct way, “what do