“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 to the surface. She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know. I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it through. But—yes—about her—I think she is afraid to marry again. If she does ever consent, it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking a husband. If she had sixteen hundred—either she would never marry at all, or she would be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for yourself. D'ye follow me? If you'll leave it to me, I can find a much better way than that—better for all of us.”