Page:Betty Gordon in Washington.djvu/202

192 table that night provoked mingled merriment and concern.

"Never mind, it will teach 'em self-reliance," Mr. Littell insisted, when his wife protested that the girls would have to be more closely chaperoned on subsequent trips. "Falling into scrapes is the finest lesson-book ever opened to the heedless."

Sunday morning the girls and Mrs. Littell motored to Washington and attended services in one of the fine old churches. There they had an excellent opportunity to observe the President of the United States and his wife, who, as Libbie said disappointedly at dinner that day, "looked just like anybody."

"I hope you didn't expect them to get up and make a speech?" teased her uncle. "However, I'm glad you saw them, my dear. A country where the head of the government 'looks just like anybody' and goes to church as simply and reverently as any one else is the finest in the world."

Early in the new week Bobby announced that it was their duty, meaning the girl contingent, to go into the city and pay a call upon a friend of the Littells' who was staying with an aunt at one of the large hotels. They had met them at church, and a tentative promise had been given, which Bobby was determined should be kept.

"If it wasn't for me this family would have no