baroness,
called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow
landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an
oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of
international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away
from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav--which made me quite calmly
and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of
under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and
put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!

From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I
intended to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg.
And there at the rail as I stepped on the _Baltic_ was the Other Man, to
wit, Duncan Argyll McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English
mackintosh. His face went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for
he'd dropped up to Banff last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I
were there for a week. He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I
liked him a lot. But when Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong,"
as he put it, and quietly tipped Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald
Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to his ranch without as much as
saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll McKail isn't an Irishman, as you
might in time gather from that name of his. He's a Scotch-Canadian, and
he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer who's taken up farming in
the Northwest. But I could see right away that he was a gentleman (I
_hate_ that word, but where'll you get another one to take its place?)
and had known nice people, even before I found out he'd taught the
Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a
cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is
so unsettled in England just now.

But you're a woman, and before I go any further you'll want to know what
Duncan looks like.

Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of
the Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and
has brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like
Holbein's "Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully
brown as an Indian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalieri had happened to
marry a Lord Kitchener, and had happened to have a thirty-year-old son,
I feel quite sure he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my
own Duncan Argyll.