Mrs. Gower presently became aware of this detached, observing, almost critical attitude.
"Your f-father is p-positively b-brutal," she found voice to declare.
"There are various sorts of brutality," Betty observed enigmatically. "I don't think daddy has a corner on the visible supply. Are you going to let him have that money?"
"No. Never," Mrs. Gower snapped.
"You may lose a great deal more than the house by that," Betty murmured.
But if Mrs. Gower heard the words they conveyed no meaning to her agitated mind. She was rapidly approaching that incomprehensible state in which a woman laughs and cries in the same breath, and Betty got up with a faintly contemptuous curl to her red lips. She went out into the hall and pressed a button. A maid materialized.
"Go into the dining room and attend to mamma, if you please, Mary," Betty said.
Then she skipped nimbly upstairs, two steps at a time, and went into a room on the second floor, a room furnished something after the fashion of a library in which her father sat in a big leather chair chewing on an unlighted cigar.
Betty perched on the arm of his chair and ran her fingers through a patch on top of his head where the hair was growing a bit thin.
"Daddy," she asked, "did you mean that about going smash?"