“Where did you and your mother pick up that vagabond, anyhow?” demanded Richmond.
“I picked him up. D’Artois told you——”
“D’Artois was talking about him as an artist, not as an equal.”
“Equal!” cried Beatrice. And she laughed mockingly.
“Don’t be impudent to me!” raged her father. “You’ve been brought up in a certain way. You’re not fit for any other way of life. You are not to be allowed to make a fool of yourself, to muddle your life up. I’ll have no scandals in my family—no scoundrels blackmailing me to release my daughter.”
Beatrice’s look at him was so appealing, so reminiscent of his bold talk about democracy, about the democracy of achievement, that some men, if they had been in his place, would have been ashamed and confounded. Not Daniel Richmond, however—not when his plans of social grandeur, nursed all these years in his secretest heart, were endangered.
When Rhoda was marrying the Earl of Broadstairs he had been able to keep his pose intact—had contrived to protest against one of his children’s yielding to the craze for “decayed aristocrats with fly-blown titles,” and to yield only because “personally, Broadstairs wasn’t as bad as some,” and because the girl and her mother had made it clear to him that her heart would be broken if she didn’t get the man she loved—at the price such luxuries cost. He had assumed that Beatrice had been equally well brought up—to love where she should, to do as well in the American upper class as her sister had done in the foreign upper class. This revelation of her waywardness, the waywardness of the child who was his especial pride, for whom he had dreamed the most dazzling splendors of social grandeurs in New York—this astounding revelation put him in the rage of his life. His face was a study in hatefulness. Beatrice shivered as she looked at it—but not with fear.
“Yes,” said she calmly, after a pause. “I’ve been brought up in a certain way. But I was born to insist on having what I want. I want Roger. And, father, I’m going to have him—in spite of you both.”
After a pause, in a voice of dreadful calm Richmond said: “You are going to marry Peter Vanderkief within six weeks or two months—or you are going to get the shock of your willful life.”
“No,” replied she, in a voice of calm equally dreadful. “I have already had that shock. I thought mother was the snob. I thought women were the snobs. But I see it’s the men—worse than the women—you worse than mother. Oh, father,” she said, changing suddenly to passionate pleading, “how can you be like this! You—of all men!”