"Yes, but I don't intend it to be a long engagement," Norah proclaimed, when he paused for a moment to chew his heavy mustache. "I intend to get married."
Mr. Caffyn swung round upon his heels and faced his daughter.
"This, I suppose, is the result of the education I've given you. Insolence and defiance! Don't say another word or you'll make me lose my temper. Not another word. Norah, I insist on silence. Do you hear me? You have grievously disappointed my fondest hopes. I have not been a strict father. Indeed, I have been too indulgent. But I never imagined my daughter capable of a folly like this. If I'd thought, twenty-one years ago, when I bought this house with the idea of creating a happy home for you all, that I should be repaid like this I would have.... I would have...."
But Mr. Caffyn's apodosis was never divulged, because, seized with an access of rage, he turned out the gas and hurried from the room. In the hall he shouted back to know if his wife was going to sit up all night. Mrs. Caffyn hurried after her husband as fast as she was able across the darkened room.
"I'm coming, dear, now. Yes, dear, I'm coming now. Ouch! My knee!... I'm sure Norah will be more sensible in the morning," she was heard murmuring on her way up-stairs.
"I suppose he thinks I shall go on living with him forever," exclaimed Norah, savagely throwing herself down into her father's arm-chair. "In my opinion most parents are fit to be only children. Light the gas again, Roland; I want to write a note to Wilfred."
III
By the time morning was come Norah had decided that she would rather go on the stage than be engaged to Wilfred Curlew. The extraordinary thing was that she should never have realized, before her conversation with Mr. Vavasour, how obviously the stage was indicated as the right career for her. It was true that she had never until now seriously contemplated a career, and the mild way she had accepted herself merely as the most important member of a large family was sufficient answer to the silly accusations made by her father last night. Perhaps he would begin to appreciate her now when he was on the point of losing her; perhaps he would regret that he had ever suggested she was indifferent to the claims of family life; in future she should take care to be indifferent to everybody's feelings except her own; she would teach her father a lesson. It never entered Norah's head that there would be any difficulty about going on the stage apart from paternal opposition, and she wondered how many famous people had owed their careers to a fortuitous event like her meeting with Mr. Vavasour. At any rate, it would not be more difficult to obtain her father's permission to embark on this suddenly conceived adventure than it would be to obtain his permission to wear on the third finger of her left hand the rather cheap ring that was the outward sign of her intention to marry Wilfred. Confronted by the two alternatives—success in the theater and matrimony with Wilfred—she felt that success was much the less remote of the two; in fact, the more she thought about it the farther away receded matrimony and the more clearly defined became success. "I don't want to be a great actress," she explained to herself; "I want to be a successful actress." She half made up her mind to go out and talk to Lily about the new project, but on second thoughts she decided not to alarm her parents by any prospect so definite as would be implied in availing herself of the practical assistance that Lily and her mother could afford her in carrying out her plan. It would be more tactful to present as alternatives the definite fact of being engaged to Wilfred or the indefinite idea of being able some time or other in the future to adopt the stage as a profession. The more Norah thought about Wilfred the less in love with him she felt, and the less in love with him she felt the easier would be her task to-night. In her note she had told him to come in after supper, as usual, but she had not said a word about her intention to precipitate their affair. Would it impress her father if she and Wilfred were to meet him at the station and approach the subject before supper? No, on the whole, she decided, it would be more prudent to provoke the final scene otherwise, and her heart quickened slightly at the thought of the surprise she was going to spring upon the family that evening.
Norah was unusually pleasant to everybody all day: she gave Vincent some sweets that she did not like herself; she offered to take Gladys and Marjorie for a walk in Kensington Gardens, because a rumor had reached her of a wonderful display of hats in one of the big shops in Kensington High Street. She noticed that when her father came back from the office he seemed to have forgotten about the scene of last night, and she saw her mother's spirits rising at the prospect of an undisturbed evening. After supper Mr. Caffyn sat down as usual in his arm-chair; Gladys and Marjorie, tired after their long walk and exhausted with the contemplation of shop-windows in which they had perceived nothing to interest themselves, went off to bed without trying for a moment's grace. The upper leaves of the dining-table were removed, and a party of billiards was made up with Norah and Cecil matched against Roland and Dorothy; Vincent was allowed to chalk the tips of the cues, Agnes and Edna to quarrel over the marking. Mrs. Caffyn, with a sigh of relief for the comfortable wheels on which the evening was running, took the arm-chair opposite her husband and read with unusual concentration what she imagined was yesterday's morning paper, but which, as a matter of fact, was the morning paper of a month ago. Soon the front-door bell rang, and a friend of Roland's, called Arthur Drake, with whom Norah had been in love for a week about a year ago and of whom Dorothy was slightly enamoured at the present, came in full of a new round game for the billiard-table that he had just learned in another house. Cecil went off to his home-work and left Arthur to explain the new game—a complicated invention in which five small skittles, a cork, and a bell suspended from the gas-bracket each played a part. Mr. Caffyn fended off the butt-ends of the cues that were continually bumping into him amid a great deal of shouting and laughter; Agnes trod on her mother's corn; Vincent grazed his knuckles in fielding a billiard-ball that was bound for his father's head.
"And where's old Wilfred?" Arthur Drake suddenly inquired.