She flushed even now at the thought of some of the hateful and wicked accusations of the past. Then, after a moment's pause, she continued more warmly:
“It is you people in society who get hold of some misquoted story, some ridiculous libel long ago crushed at the cost of the libeler it is you who do untold mischief! Only last summer I remember seeing in a paper the truest sentence that was ever written of my father, and it was this, 'Probably no one man has ever had to endure such gross personal insults, such widespread hostility, such perpetual calumny.' Why are you to judge him? Even if you had a special call to it, how could you justly judge him when you will not hear him, or know him, or fairly study his writings, or question his friends? How can you know anything whatever about him? Why, if he judged you and your party as you judge him, you would be furious!”
“My dear, you speak with so much warmth; if you would only discuss things calmly!” said Mr. Fane-Smith. “Remember what George Herbert says: 'Calmness is a great advantage.' You bring too much feeling to the discussion.”
“How can I help feeling when you are slandering my father?” exclaimed Erica. “I have tried to be calm, but there are limits to endurance! Would you like Rose to sit silently while my father told her without any ground that you were a wicked man?”
When matters were reversed in this crude way, Mr. Fane-Smith winced a little.
“The cases are different,” he suggested.
“Do you think atheists don't love their children as much as Christians?” cried Erica, half choked with indignant anger. A vision of the past, of her dead mother, of her father's never-failing tenderness brought a cloud of tears to her eyes. She brushed them away. “The cases are different, as you say; but does a man care less for his home, when outside it he is badgered and insulted, or does he care infinitely more? Does a man care less for his child because, to get her food, he has had to go short himself, or does he care more? I think the man who has had to toil with all his might for his family loves it better than the rich man can. You say I speak with too much warmth, too much feeling. My complaint is the other way I can't find words strong enough to give you any idea of what my father has always been to me. To leave him would be to wrong my conscience, and to forsake my duty; and to distrust God. I will NEVER leave him!”
With that she got up and left the room, and Mr. Fane-Smith leaned back in his chair with a sigh, his eyes fixed absently upon a portrait of Napoleon above his mantel piece, his mind more completely shaken out of its ordinary grooves than it had been for years. He was a narrow-minded man, but he was honest. He saw that he had judged Raeburn very unfairly. But perhaps what occupied his thoughts the most was the question “Would Rose have been able to say of him all that Erica had said of her father?” He sighed many times, but after awhile slid back into the old habits of thought.
“Erica is a brave, noble, little thing,” he said to himself, “but far from orthodox far from orthodox! Socinian tendencies.”