FORE:SAKURADU AVENUE IN TOKIO. SAKURADU AVENUE IN TOKIO."I won't have him," the Doctor's voice broke out again, and there was a kind of sob in it, "I won't have the Clockwork man at any[Pg 186] price. Every nerve in my body cries out against him. He is the scandal of the ages. He must be hushed up, hiddenforgotten."
FORE:"Coralie! Coralie Rothvelt!"--my cry was an honest one--"you tempt me beyond human endurance.""Maybe not," I replied, being nothing if not disputatious, "and she does strike me as one thrown upon her own intuitions for everything; but if she's the lady she is entirely by her own personal quality, Lieutenant, she's a wonder!"
FORE:Quite. But it seems to me I am far from obstinate. I have given way.
THREE:Do you really mean she has gone? he asked.
THREE:So we played the game--oldest game on earth--and loveliest. Bungling moves we made, as you see, and sometimes did not know whose move it was. At length she admitted that this is a very unsafe world in which to be kind to soldiers. I told how fickle some of them were. She would not say she would--or wouldn't--make my case a permanent exception or a solitary one; yet with me she blissfully pooh-poohed the idea that our acquaintance was new, she being so wonderfully like my mother, and I being so wonderfully ditto, ditto. And when I burst into a blazing eulogy of my mother, my listener gave me kinder looks than I ever deserved of any woman alive. On my trying to reciprocate, she asked me for more flowers and hurried back to our earlier theme.
