Alfred frowned at Evander's comment, considering. "Maybe," he allowed, because it seemed to make sense on the surface of it. From his quite limited interaction with Brannon Fisk, however, Alfred hadn't gotten the impression that he had any degree of tolerance whatsoever for troublesome antics. Zelda had always said her father was stern, and strict — but she did have a lot of stories from her childhood that might qualify, in Evander's mind, as troublesome antics, so perhaps his brother's guess wasn't far off. How would Evander react if, for instance, Charity took a rowboat out on the Irvingly lake and declared her intention to be a pirate? Probably not any more gracefully than Brannon Fisk had when Zelda had done that as a child, and likely a good deal worse.

"He certainly doesn't have any tolerance for sailors," he commented wistfully. "I might as well have said I collected snapdragons for a living. Except if snapdragons had some dubious ethical connotations," he mused. The implication, he was fairly certain, was that he was both financially and morally unfit to court Zelda, though the latter hadn't been stated explicitly.