COLONEL.
Say it, mentor—so harsh and violent!
ADELAIDE.
Worse than that, you were unjust.
COLONEL.
I said the same thing to myself last night, as I went to Ida's room and heard the poor thing cry. I was a hurt, angry man and was wrong in the form—but in the matter itself I was, all the same, right. Let him be member of Parliament; he may be better suited for it than I. It is his being a newspaper writer that separates us.
ADELAIDE.
But he is only doing what you did yourself!
COLONEL.
Don't remind me of that folly! Were he as my son-in-law to hold a different opinion from mine regarding current happenings—that I could doubtless stand. But if day by day he were to proclaim aloud to the world feelings and sentiments the opposite of mine, and I had to read them, and had to hear my son-in-law reproached and laughed at for them on all sides by old friends and comrades, and I had to swallow it all—you see that is more than I could bear!