"Don't wish to be a débutante?" cried the astonished gentleman. "Why, my child, the pollywog might as well decide that it does not wish to be a frog! At a certain age young women of a certain position naturally have to be presented to society. What else is there for them to do?"
"Oh, lots of things," said the girl with impatient vagueness. "They can be teachers or librarians, or—stenographers, or journalists—something useful, you know."
"Never," said the Major with pained emphasis, "while I am alive and able to support her, shall a daughter of mine step out of that station in life to which it has pleased God to call her! No lady of my family has yet, I thank God, been under the necessity of becoming anything 'useful'—Useful! Absurd!"
(Joan had a momentary vision of her frail mother at sewing-machine and housework; the three Misses Darcy struggling to make ends meet by means of paying guests who did not always pay.)
"May I ask," continued her father with a dignity that verged upon acerbity, "the reason for this sudden desire on your part to be 'useful'? It is a desire usually confined, I think, to ladies who have ceased to be ornamental," he added, with a gallant inclination in her direction.
"Oh, Dad, you know what I mean!" she said rather desperately. "I simply want to be independent."
"And where can you be more independent than under your father's roof?" he demanded. "Free to come and go as you choose, free to entertain your friends as you like, to make what purchases you will, to run up accounts at the shops—"
"And without a penny I can call my own!" blurted out Joan.
"As to that," he remarked with a shrug of distaste, "you have merely to come to your father, my child."
"Exactly," said Joan bitterly.