"I've got to have a military attaché, you know. I could get the billet for you."
"Why select me for the honor? You'll be beset with applications."
"Yes, but I like you, Harvey. You are your father come to life again. I love you—as if you were your father—or my son. I'm old. I need young shoulders to lean on. I've nobody else but you. And you need me. You've had a whack in the solar plexus. You're seeing stars. But you mustn't let 'em count you out. Once you get your breath you'll be as good a man as you ever were. But don't lie down and take the count.
"Besides, I can help you while you're helping me. It's a new world for you, Harvey. Nobody ought to die without seeing France and England—the Old World that's so much newer than ours and so much wiser in so many ways. It's your opportunity. It may mean wonderful things for you. You can't refuse. You won't refuse, will you?"
The very impact of his blows pounded Harvey's cold heart to a glow. The word "opportunity" glinted like a shower of sparks in the night. He smiled in spite of himself. He felt such a leap of new blood in his arteries, such a rush of fresh air into his lungs, that he seemed to waken from a coma. He could not speak, but he thrust his hand across the table and wrung the Senator's fat old fingers till they ached.
CHAPTER XLVI
WILLIE ENSLEE was as little masculine as a man could be without being in the least effeminate. Ten Eyck, whose French was more fluent than exact, called him "petite." His head was small and childish, and the more infantile for a great rearward overhang that would have looked better on a yacht. His voice was high and trebling in its sound. His costumes were always of next season or the season after next. Yet, carefully as he dressed, his clothes never dignified him nor he them. Rich as he was, he attracted few parasites.
Now, no one realized Willie Enslee's defects half so thoroughly as did Willie Enslee. But his failings did not amuse him as they did other people; he could not laugh with the world at himself. He knew the world laughed at him, and not without cause, and yet he hated the world for its laughter. He hated everybody he knew almost as much as he hated himself. To this misanthropy there was one exception—Persis. He hated her, too, in a way, for she never concealed her scorn of him, and she ridiculed his foibles before his face; but he found her so beautiful that he loved her while he loathed her, desired while he abhorred.
He found her cold and flippant to his most earnest moods, but he assumed that she was cold and flippant to everybody else. She certainly had that reputation, and he comforted himself with the feeling that, while she may have failed in response to his ardors, it was not because she was in love with anybody else.