“Either kill him or cure him.”
“I should kill him, if I could,” said Sybil. “I never knew so perverse a man in the whole course of my life.”
She dragged out the last words with an emphasis that might have led one to suppose the course of her life embraced a period of at least ninety-nine years.
“What is he perverse about?” inquired her friend.
“He won’t change his politics, he won’t go back to the States, and he won’t marry the girl he ought to marry.”
She enumerated these grievances with a gusto of indignation that made us scream with laughter.
“I thought his politics were on the right side—that is, on your side,” said Millicent when she had recovered her gravity.
“That’s the wrong side,” said Sybil; “her politics are strongly Democratic, and there is not the ghost of a chance for him, unless he turns Democrat too.”
“But if he does not want a chance?” I ventured to put in.
“But he ought; I want him to want it. She’s the very sweetest girl in the whole of the United States; and her father is the dearest old man, and would give her a splendid fortune if Mr. Halsted would marry her. And everybody believed he would; only old Nick put it into his head to come out to Europe, and he has gone and fallen in love with another girl!”