She paused, and I, as though I had been speaking, drew a long breath. Had she been reading from a book her tone could not have been more impersonal. I might have been one of a class of school-boys to whom she was expounding a problem. At the Point I have heard officers’ wives use the same tone to the enlisted men. Its effect on them was to drive them into a surly silence. But Miss Fiske did not seem conscious of her tone. “After I had spoken,” she went on evenly, “they told me of your reputation in this country, that you are known to be quite fearless. They told me of your ordering your own men to shoot you, and of how you took a cannon with your hands. Well, I cannot see--since your reputation for bravery is so well established--that you need to prove it further, certainly not by engaging in a silly duel. You cannot add to it by fighting my brother, and if you should injure him, you would bring cruel distress to--to others.” “I assure you---” I began. “Pardon me,” she said, raising her hand, but still speaking in the same even tone. “Let me explain myself fully. Your own friends said in my hearing,” she went on, “that they did not desire a fight. It is then my remark only which apparently makes it inevitable.” She drew herself up and her tone grew even more distant and disdainful. “Now, it is not possible,” she exclaimed, “that you and your friends are going to take advantage of my mistake, and make it the excuse for this meeting. Suppose any harm should come to my brother.” For the first time her voice carried a touch of feeling. “It would be my fault. I would always have myself to blame. And I want to ask you not to fight him. I want to ask you to withdraw from this altogether.” I was completely confused. Never before had a young lady of a class which I had so seldom met, spoken to me even in the words of everyday civility, and now this one, who was the most wonderful and beautiful woman I had ever seen, was asking me to grant an impossible favor, was speaking of my reputation for bravery as though it were a fact which everyone accepted, and was begging me not to make her suffer. What added to my perplexity was that she asked me to act only as I desired to act, but she asked it in such a manner that every nerve in me rebelled. I could not understand how she could ask so great a favor of one she held in such evident contempt. It seemed to me that she should not have addressed me at all, or if she did ask me to stultify my honor and spare the life of her precious brother she should not have done so in the same tone with which she would have asked a tradesman for his bill. The fact that I knew, since I meant to fire in the air, that the duel was a farce, made it still more difficult for me to speak. But I managed to say that what she asked was impossible.