In a flash her mood changed and she laughed lightly.
“Who would think it of you, Mr. Winton. Of all men I should have said you were the last to care so much for the social diversions. Shall we go in?”
IX. THE BLOCK SIGNAL.
If Mr. John Winton, C. E., stood in need of a moral tonic, as Adams had so delicately intimated to Miss Bessie Carteret, it was administered in quantity sufficient before he slept on the night of dinner-givings.
For a clear-eyed theorist, free from all heart-trammelings and able to grasp the unsentimental fact, the enemy's new plan of campaign wrote itself quite legibly. With his pick and choice among the time-killing expedients the Rajah could scarcely have found one more to his purpose than the private car Rosemary, including in its passenger list a Miss Virginia Carteret.
All of which Adams, substituting friendly frankness for the disciplinary traditions of the service, set forth in good Bostonian English for the benefit and behoof of his chief, and was answered according to his deserts with scoffings and deridings.
“I wasn't born yesterday, Morty, and I'm not so desperately asinine as you seem to think,” was the besotted one's summing-up. “I know the Rajah doesn't split hairs in a business fight, but he is hardly unscrupulous enough to use Miss Carteret as a cat's-paw.”
But Adams would not be scoffed aside so easily.
“You're off in your estimate of Mr. Darrah, Jack, 'way off. I know the tradition: that a Southern gentleman is all chivalry when it comes to a matter touching his womankind, and I don't controvert it as a general proposition. But the Rajah has been a fighting Western railroad magnate so long that his accent is about the only Southern asset he has retained. If I'm any good at guessing, he will stick at nothing to gain his end.”