"I think," said Joan quietly, "we'd better not say 'fastidiousness.'"
She was struggling, struggling so hard that her hands were clenched, to do justice to her father. Had she misjudged him? Was his marriage after all not the horrid thing she had thought it, but an honest effort to atone to the child he had beggared? Something within her cried "No!" Her father had sacrificed nothing in the marriage. He had simply yielded, without a struggle, to the lure of the flesh-pots. Worse than this, the girl recalled honeymooning incidents that often made her shudder with mental nausea; certain billing and cooing which she had not always been able to avoid. It was not only the flesh-pots that had lured him....
"Cad!" she cried to herself fiercely. "Cad and liar!" And the terrible thing was that he did not seem to know he was being a cad and a liar.
Aloud she said, "And what did Mrs. Calloway get out of the bargain?"
The Major stared at her, astounded. It was a question so absurd that he literally could not answer it. Quite unconsciously his eyes strayed beyond her after a moment to a mirror, as if for reassurance.
Joan burst out laughing. The laughter was so palpably close to tears that her father forgave it, and held out his arms to her. "There, there, my poor child! You're overwrought," he murmured. "Come to Daddy!"
She had lost all desire to weep on his shoulder now, however, and Richard Darcy shrank from the look she gave him, as a more innocent man than he might have shrunk; so level it was, so keen and without mercy. She saw her father in that moment not only as cad and liar, but as something very close to a thief. As surely as if she had been told in words, she knew why her mother, after fighting for years to keep her bit of property safe for her child, had at the last left it to the guardianship of her husband. It was to show him she trusted him, to put him on honor, as it were; to bolster up his waning self-respect by this final supreme act of faith in him. And he had betrayed her.
Joan shrugged, and turned to go. Her head hung in shame, and Richard Darcy knew that the shame was not for herself. What passed through her brain then was for the moment clear to him, as it is sometimes with people of one blood.
"I dare say," he said very low with a sort of dreadful questioning, "that the law might—might hold me responsible as guardian of your property, my daughter. If you cared to—if you wished to—make an issue of it?"
"What good would that do" she replied brutally. "The money's gone, isn't it?"