"Look heah, papa! Mr.Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to do it fo' him." The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from falling off.

His daughter continued: "He's got into an awful difficulty with his edito' and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them." "I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel, "but Mr.Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability." "You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said ?" cried the girl.
"Then Ah don't see but what you'll have to explain it you'self, Mr.
Fulkerson." "Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel," said Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, "that I can only throw in a little side-light here and there." The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic satisfaction.

He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr.
Fulkerson's appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he had arranged for meetings between gentlemen.

Next to bearing a challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful.
But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.
"I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to the serious nature of the facts, "that Mr.Lindau had given Mr.Dryfoos offence by some of his questions at the dinner-table last night." "Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to withdraw his words at the colonel's look of displeasure.
"I have no reflections to make upon Mr.Landau," Colonel Woodburn continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; "I do not agree with Mr.Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far as they had no personal bearing." "Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of her father's chair.
"At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr.Dryfoos felt a personal censure in Mr.Lindau's questions concerning his suppression of the strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it." "Exactly," Fulkerson assented.
"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like Mr.March--I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the matter--could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe." "Yes, I see," said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father's, that Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.
"Mr.Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right from his point of view, and Mr.Dryfoos was equally right.

The position of Mr.March is perfectly correct--" His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm.