Soon it came with, “What do you want?”
“To talk with you a moment, General,” she replied.
“No time for talking.”
“I will wait,” she said.
He wrote a few moments, then said, “May as well hear it now as ever—what is it?”
“I would like to ask you if you had a son in this volunteer service, sent up from the South as far as St. Louis, sick and like to die, and some ignorant, careless officer had made out his furlough papers wrong—”
“What do you want!”
“—would you not be glad, if you were away, if your poor boy could find a friend?”
“What do you want, I say? This is nothing to the purpose.”
“Do you not think that friend ought to do all she could to save your boy?”