"How often have I begged you not to speak of it in that tone?"
"Did I not express myself tenderly enough? There is plenty of romance in your love, I should fancy. A young middle-class Government clerk without fortune or prospects, and a high-born Baroness and future heiress--secret meetings--prospective opposition of the whole family, struggles and emotions ad infinitum. I congratulate you on all these pleasant things. I should look on the business as an awkward one myself, I know."
"That I believe," said George, with a touch of sarcasm; "but, my dear Max, you really are not competent to pronounce on such matters."
"My nature being an out-and-out prosaic one," concluded Max, with perfect equanimity. "Well, I can't say you there tell me anything new. My father perpetually impresses on my mind the fact that I lack all tendency to the ideal. He has conscientiously striven to impart to me these more elevated views and notions, but unfortunately, it has not answered. I do not belong to the class of 'highly organised natures,' such as yourself, for instance. You are far more to my father's taste, and I think he would not hesitate a moment could he adopt you in my place."
A smile passed over George's face.
"If you agree to it, I have no objection."
"Just try it," said Max, dryly. "He is exceptionally gracious to you, because he happens to have taken a special fancy to you; but, in real truth, he is within an ace of turning misanthrope and man-hater. Nothing satisfies him. All his judgments are distorted, his views tinged by that bitter irritability of spirit which he ascribes to an unappeased yearning after the ideal, and that is the ground of the incessant warfare between us. He cannot forgive me for finding myself tolerably comfortable in this miserable, worthless world, with which he himself is at perpetual loggerheads. In fact, matters between us are growing more and more unbearable day by day."
"You do your father an injustice," said George, soothingly. "The man who has given up, as he has given up, home, standing, and freedom, to that which he calls his ideal, has a right to apply a higher standard to the world and to his fellow-creatures."
"But I am not up to the higher standard, you see," declared the young surgeon, testily. "You are much nearer the mark. This my father detected at once, and sequestrated you to his own use accordingly. You would sink wonderfully in his estimation though, if he could guess that, in the very first days of your stay here, you committed the boundless folly of falling in love."
"Max, I beg of you," his friend broke in angrily; but Max was now fairly under way, and was not to be stopped.