"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."
"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long is she going to stay? What's it all about?"
"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining permanently with me."
She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd, however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated habit of never doing the obvious.
He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went on hastily:
"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life. But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her, surely must have wondered why she did not come home."
Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.
"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it for?"
"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you might——"
"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality, leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can. She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the situation if you can."