The Colonel grew serious. “By Gad! you are right, Burns! Mrs. Barrimore keeps my faith in woman from crumbling to dust. How sweet and girlish she looked at dinner to-night! It seems absurd that she should be Philip’s mother. Philip looks the older of the two. I think, between you and me, that it is a little too bad of Philip to go away to that bungalow. Mrs. Barrimore feels it, I could see, even while she tried to show interest in it to-night.”
“You will scarcely believe it, Colonel,” broke out Uncle Robert, “but Philip says my quotations have driven him away.”
“You do quote a lot, you know,” the Colonel told him laughing; “and authors are proverbially irritable.”
“‘They damn those authors whom they never read,’” said Uncle Robert. “That is from Churchill, and is to be found in ‘The Candidate.’ I told Philip so this morning; I had quoted Chaucer, and Philip had said, with more vigor than politeness, ‘Damn Chaucer!’ Now Philip never reads Chaucer—never has, I should say. In my young days young men read standard works, and digested them. Nowadays they read fiction.”
Colonel Lane stifled a yawn, and once more looked through the window at his daughter, now in earnest conversation with Philip Barrimore.
Uncle Robert’s eyes followed his friend’s.
“Doesn’t your little Phyllis appear to be on very confidential terms with our boy to-night?” he observed.
“Yes, she does,” answered the Colonel brusquely. “She will be in love with him next—to his undoing!”
Then had followed the quotation overheard by young Barrimore.
“Oh, Love! thou bane of the most generous souls,
Thou doubtful pleasure, and thou certain pain.”