"Ah! that's where I blush. I always have roses wherever I go; didn't your lady from Banbury Cross do the same thing with the music? Well, I get as far off that as I can--most music. Wagner's good if you're up against a man. You never hear him crying 'Enuf.' Well, now, that's right. So you want me for the I.A.L.--or, rather, your father does. Why didn't he ask me on the ship?" He swung back in his chair and looked her over from head to foot. She had always been a little afraid of the sensitive eyes, and they did not fail to magnetise her as heretofore. It was possible, however, to be very frank with such a man; she spoke with good assurance when she said: "Oh! I suppose he didn't think of it." "You mean that he didn't know enough about me? Why, that's fair. I dare say he heard my name for the first time that night I ran the charity concert for him. Guns and the gospel don't go well together, my dear lady, not in civilized parts. Your father won't want rifles until he goes to China to turn the great god Bud inside out. I'll let him have a consignment cheap when he's starting." She thought it a little brutal, hardly the thing he should have said; but his good humour was invincible, and she forgave him immediately. "The fact is," he ran on, "your father is a good man, Miss Silvester, and I'm a merchant. Where we come together is in admiring a certain fellow passenger who ran the ship and will run other ships. There we're on common ground. Now say what you like to me and I'll hear it, for I've just twenty minutes at your disposal, and you may count every one of them. To begin with the I.A.L.--does your father remember that I'm a gunmaker?" She was vastly puzzled. "I think he knows it in a vague way. The captain of the _Oceanic_ said you were building the new American navy--is that quite true?" "It would be in a prospectus. My house builds one of the new cruisers, and some of the destroyers. Guns are the bigger line. I've come to Europe to sell guns. Did they tell you that also?" "Yes, I think everyone knows it." "Then why come to me? Would you go to the keeper of a saloon and ask him to help you to put down the drink? He'd tell you that drink made George Washington, just as I tell you that guns made your Lord Nelson. Would the Admiral have joined your I.A.L.?" "Oh," she said, with womanly obstinacy, "then you still think there is no alternative but war?" He laughed and began to make holes with his pencil in the blotting pad before him.