"Father didn't say anything about him," she said aloud. She thrust the card back into the book and reached up and snapped out the light. CHAPTER XIX A FORECAST AT THE WHIPPLES' There was a cup of tea at the Whipples' for any one that dropped in at five o'clock. The general kept a syphon in the icebox, and his wife's tea, which he loathed, gave him his excuse. He was fond of saying that an exacting government made it impossible for an army officer to get acquainted with his wife until after his retirement, and then, he declared, there was nothing to discuss but the opportunities in life which they had missed. They talked a great deal to each other about their neighbors, and about their friends in the army whose lives they were able to follow through the daily list of transfers in the newspapers, and the ampler current history of the military establishment in the Army and Navy Journal. Few men in Clarkson had time for the general. He found the club an unsocial place, and he preferred his own battered copies of "Pendennis" and "Henry Esmond" to anything in the club library. Occasionally when Mrs. Whipple was out for luncheon he went to the club for midday sustenance, but the other men who hurried through their forty cents' worth of table d'hote, talked of matters that were as alien to him as marine law. It would have suited the general much better to live in Washington, where others with equally little to do assembled in force; but his wife would not hear to it. She would not have her husband, she said, becoming a professional pall bearer, and this was the occupation of retired officers of the army and navy at the capital. He submitted to her superior authority, as he always did, and settled in Clarkson, where one could get much more for one's money than in Washington.