“You dared!” Marjorie fairly gasped. “You are admitting you lied about it. I wouldn’t have believed my daughter capable of such a thing.”
Hugh believed the time had come for his promised interference.
“Now, now,” he soothed, “I fail to see what all this fuss is about. If the child wants to display her pretty neck and arms, I can’t see where the harm is—and as for her telephoning to Madame Felice, I can readily understand her doing that in order to evade an unnecessary argument.”
Marjorie Benton looked her husband over as though he were an interfering stranger.
“There have been many things which does not surprise me at your attitude,” she said icily. “However, that is aside from the point. Come, Elinor, we will go upstairs and see what Marie can do in arranging some sort of scarf about you.”
“We will do nothing of the kind. I won’t! I won’t!” Elinor stamped her foot angrily. “Once and for all, mother, you’ll have to understand that I’m not a baby, and I refuse to be ordered about in that manner. I’ll wear this dress as it is to-night, or I’ll lock myself in my room and you’ll be obliged to give my debut party without me.”
Hugh walked over to his wife and placed his hand appealingly on her lace-covered arm. “She means it, I’m afraid,” he whispered. “Hadn’t you better permit her to have her way this time? Remember, we have two hundred guests coming.”
Just for a moment Marjorie was silent, fighting what she knew was a losing battle. How bitter it was that she should have to battle with these two she loved so dearly. She turned away her face that they might not witness her struggle. When she spoke it was in her usual cool, expressionless voice—not the voice of the Marjorie Benton of Atwood, but one which the years between had evolved.
“Very well,” was her surrender, but neither Elinor who was daintily whirling about the polished floor in exuberance over her triumph over the mother she was coming to think an oppressor, nor Hugh Benton who was looking at his watch with a slight show of impatience, saw the tears in the mother’s eyes which she was heroically forcing back.
Elinor stopped suddenly in the middle of a pirouette to cock her head daintily to one side listening.