They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general’s tray before going up to his room.  The young fellow did not feel more at his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted upon the weather between them.

“I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy,” said General Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, “and I suppose you know why you have come.”  The words certainly opened the way for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had abundant time to add, “I don’t pretend that this event is unexpected, but I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you to marry my daughter.  I take it for granted that you are attached to each other, and we won’t waste time on that point.  Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her are.  How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

“Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?”

“I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a publisher.”  The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy’s mind.

“Eighteen hundred.  What did you get for your poem in March’s book?”

“That’s a very trifling matter:  fifteen dollars.”

“And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?”

“Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses.  But I wouldn’t take that, General Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his ‘lit de justice’, passed this point in silence.  “Have you any one dependent on you?”

“My mother; I take care of my mother,” answered Burnamy, proudly.

“Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?”

“I have none.”

“Then you don’t expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon her means.”

“I expect to do nothing of the kind!” cried Burnamy.  “I should be ashamed—­I should feel disgraced—­I should—­I don’t ask you—­I don’t ask her till I have the means to support her—­”

“If you were very fortunate,” continued the general, unmoved by the young fellow’s pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon his wife’s means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter’s, “if you went back to Stoller—­”

“I wouldn’t go back to him.  I don’t say he’s knowingly a rascal, but he’s ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me.  I behaved badly to him, and I’d give anything to undo the wrong I let him do himself; but I’ll never go back to him.”

“If you went back, on your old salary,” the general persisted pitilessly, “you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to twenty-five hundred a year.”