"What!"
"I can't. But you must go—rather soon, too. And you must try to persuade the Courlands to go with you."
"What are you planning to do?" demanded Darrel with the irritable impatience of a man who already has answered his own question.
"You can guess, I suppose?"
"Yes, dammit!—I can! I've been afraid you'd do some such fool thing. And I ask you, Kervyn, as a sane, sensible Yankee business man, is it necessary for you to gallop into this miserable free fight and wallow in it up to your neck? Is it? Is it necessary to propitiate your bally ancestors by pulling a gun on the Kaiser and striking an attitude?"
Guild laughed. "I'm afraid it's a matter of propitiating my own conscience, Harry. I'm afraid I'll have to strike an attitude and pull that gun."
"To the glory of the Gold Book and the Counts of Gueldres! I know! You're very quiet about such things, but I knew it was inside you all the time. Confound it! I was that worried by your letter to me! I thought you'd already done something and had been caught."
"I hadn't been doing anything, but I had been caught."
"I knew it!"
"Naturally; or I shouldn't have written you a one-act melodrama instead of a letter.... Did you destroy the letter to my mother?"