"Get busy! D'you expect me to go downstairs and drag her out of her room?"
"Yes—do anything! She isn't staying there from choice!" (But I knew better than that.) "If I slug the gezabo you might ask her up. Shall I?"
"Show an idea, man! You know she wouldn't see me!"
"What if she wouldn't! Bring her out, anyhow! Good Lord, Jack, if you're an example of lovers up North, then I say God pity Yankee girls!"
"Well, what would you do, Mr. Know-so-much?" I asked, my temper blowing up. "If she told you she'd stayed awake nights fighting it out and reached the conclusion, absolutely and without peradventure of changing her mind, that her destiny's in Azuria, what would you do then—you who know such a hell of a lot about women?" I just had to say that; it kept irritating me.
"I don't claim any knowledge of the genus," he said, looking mildly at the horizon—and wanting to laugh, I thought. "But a modicum of brain would show you she hasn't thought it out, at all. How could she in forty-eight hours, being confronted for the first time in her life with the two most glowing things in a girl's fancy—love or a throne? She's dazzled, not decided."
"She's worse," I growled. "She's hurt—that's one reason she won't come up! And allow me to say that what you know about women wouldn't fill a gnat's eye!" I seemed to be hypped on this, and couldn't get away from it.
"Well, if you've spilled the beans you'll have to pick 'em up pretty quick, for we'll be home in three days. Just be sure you don't intimate that Azuria can be less than a perfect hell to her, for that would ruin your chances forever!" And with this parting injunction, that drove terror to my heart, he walked aft to join Gates.
Going to the companionway door, I peered into the cabin. The wretched Dragot, bedecked in smoking jacket and spectacles, looking uncommonly like a monkey, I thought, was lounging behind a book. He knew that the nearer uncertainty approaches a certainty the more fatal will be the result of its upsetting; that, whereas a scheme jumbled in its infancy may recover, the slightest maladjustment on the threshold of success often spells irrevocable ruin. He was taking no chances.