“Then it is the life insurance man whose interests you are consulting? Have you taken out a policy with him?”
“Dear me, you are nearly as bad as father, but not quite so funny. You are referring to Mr. Henderson, I presume. A most delightful companion for a dance, but, my dear Dorothy, life is not all glided out to the measures of a Strauss waltz.”
“True; quite undisputable, Kate, and them sentiments do you credit. Who is the man?”
“The human soul,” continued Katherine seriously, “aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ball-room.”
“Again you score, Kate, and are rising higher and higher in my estimation. I see it all now. Those solemn utterances of yours point directly toward Hugh Miller’s ‘Old Red Sandstone’ and works of that sort, and now I remember your singing ‘When Johnny comes marching home.’ I therefore take it that Jack Lamont has arrived.”
“Oh, well, I give it up. Tell me the tragedy your own way.”
For answer Katherine withdrew her hands from behind her, and offered to her friend a sheet of paper she had been holding. Dorothy saw blazoned on the top of it a coat-of-arms, and underneath it, written in words of the most formal nature, was the information that Prince Ivan Lermontoff presented his warmest regards to Captain Kempt, U.S.N., retired, and begged permission to pay his addresses to the Captain’s daughter Katherine. Dorothy looked up from the document, and her friend said calmly:
“You see, they need another Katherine in Russia.”
“I hope she won’t be like a former one, if all I’ve read of her is true. This letter was sent to your father, then?”
“It was, and he seems to regard it as a huge joke. Said he was going to cable his consent, and as the ‘Consternation’ has sailed away, he would try to pick her up by wireless telegraphy, and secure the young man that way: suggests that I shall have a lot of new photographs taken, so that he can hand them out to the reporters when they call for particulars. Sees in his mind’s eye, he says, a huge black-lettered heading in the evening papers: ‘A Russian Prince captures one of our fairest daughters,’ and then insultingly hinted that perhaps, after all, it was better not to use my picture, as it might not bear out the ‘fair daughter’ fiction of the heading.”