Adelaide's color slowly mounted. "You don't mean that," said she.
He frowned and retorted angrily: "There's a great deal of truth that we don't like. Why do you always get mad at me for saying what we both think?"
"I admit it's foolish and wrong of me," said she; "but I can't help it. And if I get half-angry with you, I get wholly angry with myself for being contemptible enough to think those things. Don't you get angry at yourself for thinking them?"
Arthur laughed mirthlessly—an admission.
"We and father can't both be right," she pursued. "I suppose we're both partly right and partly wrong—that's usually the way it is. But I can't make up my mind just where he begins to be wrong."
"Why not admit he's right through and through, and be done with it?" cried Arthur impatiently. "Why not tell him so, and square yourself with him?"
Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away. She lingered a while in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she looked in at her father. There he sat so still that but for the regular rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead. "He's asleep," she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her heart. Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother's disregard of the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and Arthur's lives often made her wince. But the same disregard in a man did not offend her; it had the reverse effect. It seemed to her, to the woman in her, the fitting roughness of the colossal statue. "That's a man!" she now said to herself proudly, as she gazed at him.
His eyes opened and fixed upon her in a look so agonized, that she leaned, faint, against the door jamb. "What is it, father?" she gasped.
He did not answer—did not move—sat rigidly on, with that expression unchanging, as if it had been fixed there by the sculptor who had made the statue. She tried to go to him, but at the very thought she was overwhelmed by such fear as she had not had since she, a child, lay in her little bed in the dark, too terrified by the phantoms that beset her to cry out or to move. "Father! What is it?" she repeated, then wheeled and fled along the hall crying: "Mother! Mother!"
Ellen came hurrying down the stairs.