"Bolt the door," Mr. Caffyn commanded. "And be sure that the chain is properly fastened."
Then rather at a loss how to maintain the level of his majesty and wrath, he luckily discovered that Vincent had not yet gone to bed, and exhorted the assembled family to tell him if he paid £8 a term to Mr. Randell for Vincent to grow up into a pot-boy or a billiard-marker. Cecil, the recent winner of a senior scholarship at St. James's, had been grinding at his home-work in the bedroom, and he came out into the hall at this moment to plead pathetically for a few doors to be shut. His father improved the occasion by holding up Cecil as a moral example to the rest of the family, who were made to feel that if Gilbert Caffyn had not produced Cecil Caffyn, Gilbert Caffyn's life would have been wasted. The more he descanted upon Cecil's diligence and dutifulness the more sheepish Cecil himself became, so that with every fresh encomium his sleeves revealed another inch of ink-stained cuff. The only way to stop Mr. Caffyn and restore Cecil to the algebraical problem from which he had been raped by the noise outside his room seemed to be for everybody to go to bed. Agnes and Edna, their heads stuffed full of new ideas, went giggling up-stairs, whither Dorothy, yawning very elaborately, followed them. Roland decided that Cecil groaning over an algebra problem would be more endurable than having to listen to a renewal of the argument between Norah and his father, and he, too, retired. The gradual melting away of the audience quieted Mr. Caffyn, who, when he had lowered or extinguished all the gas-jets except those in the dining-room, felt that he had shown himself master of his own house, and returned to his arm-chair with the intention of nodding over the minor news in the paper until he was ready for bed himself. Norah, however, in spite of her mother's prods and whispered protests, brought him sharply back to the matter in dispute.
"Suppose I insist on being engaged to Wilfred?" she began.
"Good Heavens!" cried Mr. Caffyn. "Am I never to be allowed a little bit of peace? Here am I working all day to keep you clothed and fed, and every night of my life is made a burden to me. You don't appreciate what it is to have a father like me." His wife patted him soothingly and flatteringly upon the shoulder as if she would assure him that they all really appreciated the quality of his fatherhood very much. "Why, I know fathers," went on Mr. Caffyn, indignantly, "who spend every evening at their clubs, and upon my soul, I don't blame them. I was talking to the Bishop of Chelsea to-day. He came into the office to consult me about the scandalous language used at the whelk-stalls in Walham Road on Saturday nights—we're taking up the question with the municipal authorities. He told me I looked tired out. 'You look tired out, Mr. Caffyn,' he said. 'I am tired out, my lord,' I answered. And he was very sympathetic."
"You hear that, Norah dear?" said Mrs. Caffyn, twitching her fingers with nervousness. "Now don't worry your father any more."
"As soon as he answers my question I sha'n't worry him any more. Suppose I insist on being engaged to Wilfred Curlew? Suppose I run away and get married to him?"
"Have you any conception what marriage means?" demanded Mr. Caffyn. "Do you realize that I waited two years to marry your mother, and that I didn't propose to her until it was quite evident that my poor father must soon die? I suppose you don't want me to die, do you? Don't imagine that my death will make any difference, please."
"Gilbert, Gilbert!" begged his wife.
"Well, really, nowadays children behave in such an extraordinary fashion that it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear Norah was counting on my death."
"Gilbert, Gilbert!" she repeated, and looked in agony at the gas, as if she expected it to turn blue at such a horrible suggestion.