I looked at Margot. “Ah!” I said. “Margot is engaged.”
Margot ran across the room and kissed me. “Oh, I’m so happy, papa!” she cried.
“Is it the duke?” I asked.
She made a wry face. “He was horrid!” she said. “I couldn’t endure him.”
“So you had to fall back on the marquis?”
Neither of the women liked this way of putting the matter. It suggested that I knew the painful truth of the failure of the ducal campaign. But they were not to be put out of humor. “You liked him yourself, papa,” said Margot.
I was abstractedly thinking how I had no sense of her being my daughter or of Edna being my wife. You would say that after all we three had been through together, from Passaic up, it would be a sheer impossibility for there ever to be a sense of strangeness between us. But there is no limit to the power of the human soul to cut itself off; intimacy is hard to maintain, isolation—alas—is the natural state. I looked on them as strangers; I could feel that, in spite of their clever, resolute forcing, in spite of the hypocrisy of love for me which each doubtless maintained at all times with the other, still they could scarcely hide their feeling that I was a strange man come in from the street.
“Yes, I liked Crossley,” said I. “I think he’ll make you a good husband.”
“He is mad about her!” said Edna. “There was a while this summer when he thought he had lost her, and he all but went out of his mind.”
To look at her was to believe it; for, a lovelier girl was never displayed in all her physical perfection by a more discriminating mother.