Guild studied the pattern on the rug at his feet. After a while he said: "When a man's in love he doesn't seem to know it until it's too late."
"Rot! I knew it right away. Last winter when the Courlands were in New York I knew I was falling in love with her. It hurt, too, I can tell you. Why, Kervyn, after they sailed it hurt me so that I couldn't think of anything. I didn't eat properly. A man like you can't realize how it hurts to love a girl. But it's one incessant, omnipresent, and devilish gnawing—a sensation of emptiness indescribable filled with loud and irregular heart-throbs—a happy agony, a precious pain——"
"Harry!"
"What?" asked that young man, startled.
"Do you realize you are almost shouting?"
"Was I? Well, I'm almost totally unbalanced and I don't know how long I can stand the treatment I'm getting. I've told her mother, and she laughs at me, too. But I honestly think she likes me. What would you do, Kervyn, if you cared for a girl and you couldn't induce her to converse on the subject?"
Guild's features grew flushed and sombre. "I haven't the faintest idea what a man should do," he said. "The dignified thing would be for a man to drop the matter."
"I know. I've dropped it a hundred times a week. But she seems to be glad of it. And I can't endure that. So I re-open the subject, and she re-closes it and sits on the lid. I tell you, Kervyn, it's amounting to a living nightmare with me. I am so filled with tenderness and sentiment that I can't digest it unaided by the milk of human kindness——"
"Do you talk this way to her?" asked Guild, laughing. "If you compare unrequited love to acute indigestion no girl on earth is going to listen to you."
"I have to use some flights of imagination," said Darrel, sulkily. "A girl likes to hear anything when it's all dolled out with figures of speech. What the deuce are you laughing at? All right! Wait until you fall in love yourself. But you won't have time now; you'll enlist in some fool regiment and get your bally head knocked off! I thought I had troubles enough with Valentine, and now this business begins!"