“All right. I’ll do it,” agreed MacDowell. “Hum! Brightest boy in Canada, is he? That’s going some. Who is this Mauney Bard?”
“Oh, just a nice chap who boarded at Franklin Street with me.”
“You’re always given to exaggeration, if I may so express myself,” he smiled. “I suppose when you get it all boiled down, Mauney Bard is just a man after a job.”
“No, no, you’re all wrong, Dad. He’s more than that—I’m in love with him.”
“Who? Mauney Bard?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” said MacDowell, complacently. “You’ve been in love before now.”
“You’re wrong again, Dad,” she replied. She wanted to tell her father—or somebody—how she felt about Mauney, but her father’s interest seemed only casual. Freda consequently remained silent and became very unhappy. That silence and unhappiness of Lockwood would always arrive sooner or later. To-night was typical of her home—her mother off to a game of cards and her father chatting just as any interesting, but total, stranger might do.
Lockwood always caused a little flutter in her heart and then a depression. Her mother’s social ambition had constituted a problem which she had solved only by leaving home. Fawning upon the plutocracy was, without exception, the most disgusting practice of which Freda could conceive.
“Are we always going to go on living in this hide-bound community, Dad?” she asked, as they strolled together. “I hate it just like snakes. I could murder that Mrs. Courtney and the whole raft of them.”