“It will have to, I guess.”
“Well, then, it is my turn. I want to know why you have been making a bally idiot of yourself for the last week or so.”
Antrim hung his head. “Because I haven’t any better sense, I suppose.”
“That doesn’t go. Give me the facts.”
“There is only one to give: Isabel won’t marry me.”
“Oh, she won’t? And so you are going to make a howling wilderness of yourself because a young woman doesn’t happen to know her own mind. Is that it?”
“But she does know her own mind,” Antrim protested.
“Oh, nonsense! You are no boy, and you ought to know better. If you love her—and I take that for granted—all you have to do is just to hang on and wait; and that is what you are going to do, if I can make you.”
Antrim smiled wearily. “The way I feel at this present moment, anybody could make me do anything. I am as weak as a cat, and as sore as if I had been through a prize fight.—What on earth is that?”
“That” was a furious pounding on a near-by door, and Brant sprang up, oversetting his chair in his haste.