And Duncan Argyll, _alias_ Dinky-Dunk, is rather
reserved and quiet and, I'm afraid, rather masterful, but not as
Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern
German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking
in suavity.

And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my
breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the
face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly
decided we'd always be good friends, old-fashioned, above-board,
Platonic good friends. But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's
always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
So I had to look straight at the bosom of that awful yellow-plaid
English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the truth. And Dinky-Dunk
listened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim, and otherwise not
in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me. It was like
the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it wasn't
until the impossible little wife of an impossible big lumberman from
Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris _Herald_ with the cable in it
about that spidery Russian stage-dancer, L----, getting so nearly killed
in Theobald's car down at Long Beach, that I realized there _was_ a
trump card and that Dinky-Dunk had been too manly to play it.

I had a lot of thinking to do, the next three days.

When Theobald came on from Washington and met the steamer my conscience
troubled me and I should still have been kindness itself to him, if it
hadn't been for his proprietary manner (which, by the way, had never
annoyed me before), coupled with what I already knew. We had luncheon in
the Della Robbia room at the Vanderbilt and I was digging the marrons
out of a Nesselrode when, presto, it suddenly came over me that the
baroness was right and that _I could never marry a foreigner_. It came
like a thunderclap. But somewhere in that senate of instinct which
debates over such things down deep in the secret chambers of our souls,
I suppose, the whole problem had been talked over and fought out and put
to the vote. And in the face of the fact that Theobald Gustav had always
seemed more nearly akin to one of Ouida's demigods than any man I had
ever known, the vote had gone against him. My hero was no longer a
hero. I knew there had been times, of course, when that hero, being a
German, had rather regarded this universe of ours as a depart