"Yes, and amazed me."
"He knew it had to be done, so he did it quickly and without any nonsense. It's an old theory that given liberty and money, a boy will go to ruin. I never believed it; I don't yet. And I never saw why I should make my son a different set of living rules from those I make for myself. Of course, I don't mean there was no law in the house; I don't think I spoiled Corrie. But I've left him pretty free, only bidding him keep straight. That I must have, and he knows it. He has got to keep straight."
A sudden grate like metal on metal roughened the deliberate speech with a suggestion of grim inflexibility. Flavia lifted vaguely startled eyes to her father.
"I don't believe you need to worry about that," reassured Gerard smiling. The echo of Corrie's fresh young tones was in their ears, as he disputed with his cousin, outside the windows at the end of the room.
"I guess not. He's too much like his mother." Mr. Rose dropped his hand on Flavia's, as she sat in her low chair beside him. "And she was what they call an aristocrat, nowadays, but I called a lady when I married her. Old family, gentle breeding, the society end, and good looks like my little girl's that seem too fine to touch; she had all and everything except money. And I gave her that."
Flavia leaned nearer to her father with the caressing confidence in mutual affection which marked all the household intercourse and pervaded the gorgeous pink villa like an actual fragrance of atmosphere.
"I gave her that. She liked to spend it. Not," his keen eyes suddenly sprang challengingly to the other man's, "Not that she married me for money. Don't think it. My wife loved me. I guess I struck her family like a cyclone; I was self-made and used to my own way, at thirty, and not uglier than my neighbors. Mrs. Tom Rose was a happy woman, until she died, when Corrie was two years old and Flavia four." He rose bruskly and crossed the room. "You don't smoke, Gerard? I always spoil a cigar when I talk."
"I don't unless there's something wrong," Gerard answered, tactfully casual. "A cigarette helps, then. But everything is very right, now. You know, these races are my holidays, although they are an important business feature, too. My factory affairs keep me hard at work most of the year. Then in the intervals I am designing and having constructed a genuine racing machine of my own, much more powerful than the ninety Mercury I'm driving now. I'm not an idle citizen, really."
Flavia's head drooped lower. He was telling her father these things as part of that steady purpose whose object she felt herself; she knew it, clairvoyantly acute.
"You get a lot out of living," commented Mr. Rose, coming back to his seat. "You enjoy it, I'm thinking."