But Miss Kinnear was not in such mad haste that she could not look in on her mother, who was being hooked up by her maid. “I’ll finish mamma, Germaine,” said Alicia. “I want to say something to her.” And the instant they were alone she came out with it: “Beatrice has broken with her father because she doesn’t want to marry Peter. And she has come to stay with us.”
Alicia hooked; her mother stood patiently, apparently studying in the long mirror the way Germaine had done her soft, gray hair. Of all the women in New York who led the fashionable life, not one was able to invest the despicable arts of prudence and calculation with so much real grace and virtue as Mrs. John Kinnear.
“What shall I do, mother?” Alicia finally asked.
“Nothing,” replied Mrs. Kinnear, in the tone of one who has deliberated and decided. “We’ll wait and see. Certainly, that dreadful, dangerous devil of a father of hers can’t object to us giving his daughter shelter—while we wait for him to try and get her back.... Beatrice is very obstinate.”
“Like iron—like steel. She says she’s in love with an artist. He is terribly handsome, but not the sort of man one would marry.”
“Foreigner?”
“No, American. I never heard of him. I can’t remember his name.”
“Good Lord, the girl’s crazy,” said Mrs. Kinnear. “Why did Mrs. Richmond let a man of that sort have a chance to get well acquainted with her daughter? Still, who’d have thought it of Beatrice? I’d as soon have expected you to do it.”
“Beatrice has got a queer streak in her,” explained Alicia. “You know, her father is—or was—very ordinary.”
“No, that’s not it,” replied Mrs. Kinnear reflectively. “Those things aren’t matters of birth and breeding. I’ve seen the lowest kind of tastes in people of excellent blood.”