“Dad, you’re absolutely impossible!”
“Oh, come now, Betty, not as bad as that! Just because I don’t agree to everything you say——”
“But you never agree with me! You seem to be opposed on principle to everything I suggest or want. It’s always been like that! From the time I was born,—how old was I, Dad, when you first saw me?”
Mr Varian looked reminiscent.
“About an hour old, I think,” he replied; “maybe a little less.”
“Well, from that moment until this, you have persistently taken the opposite side in any discussion we have had.”
“But if I hadn’t, Betty, there would have been no discussion! And, usually there hasn’t been. You’re a spoiled baby,—you always have been and always will be. Your will is strong and as it has almost never been thwarted or even curbed, you have grown up a headstrong, wilful, perverse young woman, and I’m sure I don’t know what to do with you!”
“Get rid of me, Dad,” Betty’s laugh rang out, while her looks quite belied the rather terrible character just ascribed to her.
One foot tucked under her, she sat in a veranda swing, now and then touching her toe to the floor to keep swaying. She wore a sand-colored sport suit whose matching hat lay beside her on the floor.
Her vivid, laughing face, with its big gray eyes and pink cheeks, its scarlet lips and white teeth was framed by a mop of dark brown wavy hair, now tossed by the strong breeze from the sea.