"You can tell Sard if you don't want me to; my time—my time," emphasized Judge Bogart impressively, "may come later, that she is to drop all association with this Gentleman-John tramp of hers. Make her ashamed. Make her see the vulgarity of the thing. If she rebels, why then——" said Judge Bogart darkly, as he stood there pulling down his lip, looking at his sister. "There's just one thing I won't have," he said emphatically, "a taste for low company. Sard has that." He turned, surveying his relative narrowly. "Even that little poll-parrot Minga has more pride. The girl will have to learn that she's my daughter, not the friend of Tom, Dick and Harry, but my daughter. Tell her that, do you understand, my daughter!" The Judge stood staring; he finished in the voice he used so successfully in the court-room. "If she can't take your advice, she'll take my orders." At some thoughts of the girl, clear, steady, the Judge's lower lip snarled. His legs seemed not to hold him up well. He became a curious, insecure mass of anger.
Somehow after that the whole house looked different to Miss Aurelia. She suddenly saw things through the eyes of youth, youth trying to lift itself up and away on broad paths of sympathy and justice. She saw a common condition of things where the parent forgets to grow but stands stiffly like a mile-post, pointing proudly to a road that has long been choked with weeds.
The tall, thin lady went slowly up the stairs feeling somehow curiously young and chastened, like one sent to bed on bread and water, as if she herself were found guilty before this narrow tribunal.
"Oh!" she panted. "Oh, how did he ever grow to be like this, so terrible? He was such a good young man—such a good young man." Then the thought that had once come to Dunstan came to his aunt. Perhaps no one human being ought to have power of life and death over other human beings; for this was what happened to them. This hardness and cold self-sufficiency, this was what happened to men who condemned other men to everlasting dooms. So when the hours waxed late and the young people had not returned the good lady wandered from room to room like a banshee. At last she went rather desperately to the kitchen.
"Maggie, it seems late for the girls, doesn't it? You saw them go. Were they—er—warmly dressed?"
"Yes," grinned Maggie. She turned from bread mixing, a dab of flour on her red, kind face. "I seen 'em in their pants and all."
"Their camp costumes," observed Miss Aurelia, with dignity.
"Camp or no camp," observed Maggie, with the privilege of a good cook who knows her value, "them pants is something terrible. That Minga! such things will bring one doom or another onto her."
Maggie turned to Dora. "Look at them actresses," she observed, "and where do they end? It ain't no way for a lady to dress, them pants."