A spasm crossed his face. He laid his hand on her shoulder roughly. She could think of nothing but the stern father of a wayward girl as she had seen him pictured in the movies. She hadn't supposed that such dramatic parents existed off the screen.
"Jennie, you haven't got a hundred dollars! Tell me you haven't! Don't let me think that the worst thing of all has overtaken us."
Amazed as she was, her feminine quick-wittedness came to her aid.
"Oh, you funny daddy!" she laughed, drawing his hand from her shoulder and again slipping it through her arm. "You're not a bit good at making pretend."
"Excuse me, my dear," he said, humbly, as they strolled on once more. "I'm a little nervous. I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to do a day's work again."
Jennie, too, was a little nervous, though she did her best to hide the fact. She had not expected him to take this tragically moral point of view. It made so many new complications as to her twenty-five thousand that she didn't know where she stood. Her mother might agree with him. Teddy and the girls might agree with her. To act in opposition to them all was outside her sphere of contemplation.
Indiana Avenue was indeed not so primitive but that the subject of ladies who chose their own way was frequently under discussion, and Jennie had never heard much condemnation of this liberty except where the associations were considered "low." Where, on the contrary, the situation was on a large financial scale and carried with a lordly hand, opinion, while not approving, was in a measure deferential. It was no secret that Mrs. Inglis had a sister, mysteriously known as "Mrs. Deramore," whose career had been of the most romantic; and whenever her limousine drove up to the Inglis door, as it did perhaps twice a year, all the women crowded to the windows to see the fair occupant get in and out. On one occasion Jennie had heard her mother say to their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Weatherby, "After all, with the kind of world we've got to-day, why shouldn't she?"
Jennie had not thought of herself as a second Mrs. Deramore. She had hardly thought of herself at all. The combination of Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from penury had precluded speculation as to what she might become. She made no attempt to call up this vision even now. The irony of a situation in which she had a small fortune tucked away in the glove-and-handkerchief box in her top bureau drawer, and yet was helpless to make use of it, was enough for her to deal with.
Palisade Walk is protected by a row of small, irregular, upright boulders like the dragon's teeth. At a spot where a low flat stone forms a seat between two granite cones Jennie sat down sidewise to the river, to think her situation out. Josiah, too, came to a standstill, leaning on the stick which lifelong British habit put into his hands whenever he went out-of-doors, and gazing at a scene whose very mightiness smote him through and through with a sense of his futility.
It was a view of New York which few New Yorkers know to exist, and which those who know it to exist mainly ignore. Rio from the Pão d'Assucar, Montreal from Mount Royal, Quebec from the St. Lawrence, San Francisco from the Golden Gate, are all of the earth, earthy. Manhattan as viewed from the Hudson's western bank is like the city which rose when Apollo sang, or that beheld in the Apocalypse of John.