"Hugh, don't be a baby!" she said, in passing. "Father, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!"
If the heavens had fallen my amazement might have been less. She went on in a purely colloquial tone, extricating the lace of her corsage from a spray of diamond flowers as she spoke:
"I'll tell you why she was marrying Hugh. It was for two or three reasons, every one of them to her credit. Any one who knows her and doesn't see that must be an idiot. She was marrying him, first, because he was kind to her. None of the rest of us was, unless it was Mrs. Brokenshire; and she was afraid to show it for fear you'd jump on her, father. The rest of us have treated Alix Adare like brutes. I know I have."
"Oh no!" I protested, though I could scarcely make myself audible.
"But Hugh was nice to her. He was nice to her from the start. And she couldn't forget it. No nice girl would. When he asked her to marry him she felt she had to. And then, when he put up his great big bluff of earning a living—"
"It wasn't a bluff," Hugh contradicted, his face still buried in his hands.
"Well, perhaps it wasn't," she admitted, imperturbably. "If you, father, hadn't driven him to it with your heroics—"
"If you call it heroics that I should express my will—"
"Oh your will! You seem to think that no one's got a will but you. Here we are, all grown up, two of us married, and you still try to keep us as if we were five years old. We're sick of it, and it's time some of us spoke. Jack's afraid to, and Mildred's too good; so it's up to me to say what I think."
Mr. Brokenshire's first shock having passed, he got back something of his lordly manner, into which he threw an infusion of the misunderstood.