"But then—why not have followed your vocation?" Edna enquired, with tilted eyebrows.
Cooper shook his head.
"It's an expensive training, Lady Rossiter. If I'd had the capital, I should have liked it, though."
"I understand," gently said Edna, with a whole world of implication in her tone, at which Cooper looked rather astonished, and Miss Sandiloe decidedly resentful.
"Daddy!" said a sudden voice.
Everybody looked at the forgotten Ruthie, who stood on one leg beside her father's chair.
"Daddy, I'm afraid I shall forget my piece, if I don't say it soon," said Ruthie in an excessively audible aside, and with the evident determination of displaying her histrionic attainments to the assembly.
Mark laughed, with the injudicious tolerance that he was all too apt to accord to the ill-timed demonstrations of his offspring.
"Not now, Ruthie. Perhaps Lady Rossiter doesn't want you to say your piece at all."
Few suggestions could have been better founded upon fact, and Lady Rossiter made no attempt to contradict Ruthie's father.