"Horace! Sell this house. Our home! Horace."
"Our home?" Gower continued inflexibly. "The place where we eat and sleep and entertain, you mean. We never had a home, Bessie. You will have your ancestral hall at Maple Point. You will be quite able to afford a Vancouver house if you choose. But this is mine, and it's going into the discard. I shall owe you nothing. I shall still have the cottage at Cradle Bay, if I go smash, and that is quite good enough for me. Do I make myself clear?"
Mrs. Gower was sniffing. She had taken refuge with the pince-nez and the polishing cloth. But her fingers were tremulous, and her expression was that of a woman who feels herself sadly abused and who is about to indulge in luxurious weeping.
"But, Horace, to sell this house over my head—what will p-people say?"
"I don't care two whoops what people say," Mr. Gower replied unfeelingly.
"This is simp-ply outrageous! How is Betty going to m-meet p-people?"
"You mean," her husband retorted, "how are you going to contrive the proper background against which Betty shall display her charms to the different varieties of saphead which you hit upon as being eligible to marry her? Don't worry. With the carefully conserved means at your disposal you will still be able to maintain yourself in the station in which it has pleased God to place you. You will be able to see that Betty has the proper advantages."
This straw broke the camel's back, if it is proper so to speak of a middle-aged, delicate-featured lady, delightfully gowned and coiffed and manicured. Mrs. Gower's grief waxed crescendo. Whereupon her husband, with no manifest change of expression beyond an unpleasant narrowing of his eyes, heaved his short, flesh-burdened body out of the chair and left the room.
Betty had sat silent through this conversation, a look of profound distaste slowly gathering on her fresh young face. She gazed after her father. When the door closed upon him Betty's gray eyes came to rest on her mother's bowed head and shaking shoulders. There was nothing in Betty Gower's expression which remotely suggested sympathy. She said nothing. She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her pretty chin in her cupped palms.