“Gad, so she is! Well, well! We’ll make an exception of her. Damn all the others—excepting——”
“I’d like to know,” declaimed Amos grandly, as he had expounded his two-child-a-family bill before the legislature, “I’d like to know, sir, where the woman is you might want that you can’t have? Tut, tut, sir! Do not let us fritter away our time with nonsense.”
“If you want to know straight, Pop, there’s only one skirt in these whole United States I could ever care two hamstrings for. But she’s about as interested in me as that Frances Willard dame would be to sit in on a bock-beer convention.”
“Ah! Then you have felt the possibilities in the grand passion? And may I have the lady’s name, sir? We shall see what can be done about it.”
“It’s that girl of Aunt Grace’s—Madelaine!”
“What, sir? What? The brat from the orphanage?”
“Believe me, Pop, she’s a long throw from being a brat. I guess you haven’t seen her lately.”
“Not for half a dozen years, sir, I haven’t seen her. Went to college, didn’t she? To be a lady doctor, or something?”
“She’s in Medical School now. She graduated from Radcliffe this past June. And you can take it from me, Pop, she’s there!”
“But, my God, sir! Do you mean to sit there and insinuate that a brat from an orphanage—a Nobody!—refuses to look with favor on the suit of a Ruggles? She cannot understand who you are, sir! You cannot have asked her seriously. Have you asked her, by the way? Have you? Seriously?”