There was no reply necessary. He had dropped her hand, as if it had been a cigarette-end, but now he took it again.
“My dearest girl,” he said, “I do not want you for a moment to think that I make much out of a little; do not think that I regard it as morally wrong in any way. But think, Helen,—a girl like you smoking. Is it seemly? Is it not a horrid, a nasty habit? And in the Room, too! There, there, don’t tremble, my dear. I am not angry.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Let us dismiss it altogether, Helen,” he said. “You told me, anyhow, and I know it was hard for you to do that. But”—and he was father, responsible father, when he should have been friend—“but you knew my feeling about it. It was disobedient.”
All the time his heart was warmed by the thought that she had told him, yet his sense of duty, his responsibility towards his children, which was one of the most constant motives of his acts, made him say more. He did not want to preach, but he was incapable of not doing so.
“Yes, disobedient,” he said, “to what you knew I felt. And that Martin should give you a cigarette is as bad.”
“Ah, do not bring him into it,” she said. “I am stronger than Martin,—he had to give it me. Martin would always do what I asked him. Please do not write to him or speak to him about it.”
Then, at the thought of Martin, and of the constant, continual misunderstandings between him and her father, her own great happiness urged her to try to help him.
“I am much worse than Martin is, dear father,” she said; “much more disobedient, much,—‘The Mill on the Floss,’ for instance. I had been reading it.”
“And he had lent it you?” asked Mr. Challoner, quietly.