"It surely isn't necessary--among gentlemen"--he began, cautiously
picking his phrases--"to have quite so much that's unpleasant, is it?"

"No--you're right--I didn't mean to be so rough," Thorpe declared, with
spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he perceived
the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. "I'm a
plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice, "and people must
take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended
to be of service to you--and that that ought to interest you."

The General seemed to have digested his pique. "And what I was trying
to say," he commented deferentially, "was that I thought I saw ways of
being of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all."

"How--service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.

"I know my daughter so much better than you do," explained the other; "I
know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole
situation than you can possibly be--I wonder that you won't listen to
my opinion. I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think
you should hear it."

"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough. "What IS your
opinion?"

General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave an
embarrassed little laugh. "But I can't form what you might call an
opinion," he protested, apologetically, "till I understand a bit more
clearly what it is you propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I
return to that--'still harping on my daughter,' you know. If I MUST ask
the question--is it your wish to marry her?"

Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of
something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness
that the question had been unduly intimate.

"I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry," he replied,
thoughtfully. "I may, and I may not. But--starting with that proviso--I
suppose I haven't seen any other woman that I'd rather think about
marrying than--than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see it's
all in the air, so far as my plans go."

"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. "Let us consider
it as if it were in the air--a possible contingency. This is what
I would say--My--'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being a
difficult lady--'uncertain, coy, and hard to please' as Scott says, you
know--and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which brings
her t