Val's hands had dropped from the paper as if paralyzed.
"Now, this verse-stringing is one of the things I will not have," said the old woman, with a curious tragic intensity. "I've seen enough of young girls ruining their figures, and their eyesight, and their prospects, bending over stuff like this, till it becomes a craze, and they're fit for nothing better."
She took the Comet in her hands and tried to tear it up. The ancient paper would have held out well against less fragile fingers, but Ethan did not realize the toughness of the Calvert ledger. He hurried forward.
"Oh, don't tear it. Really, really, a little scribbling isn't so fatal."
"I don't expect you to think so, my dear Ethan, when you do it yourself in two languages, having nothing better to do in either. But if I'm any judge, we've had enough of it in this family." She turned upon the hushed, awed Emmie. "Go out and play," she commanded, but with an air of saying, "Off with your head! So much for Buckingham." "As for you"—she flashed back a look at Val as she went towards the fireplace—"never let me find you wasting your youth in this pernicious fashion again as long as you live under my roof."
She put the Comet in the fire, and with the poker she pushed it down among the red-hot coals. She waited grimly while it burned, then, without another word or look, she went back to the long room. Ethan had been perilously near laughing at the total rout of the two malefactors. No sooner had the guardian of the family virtue disappeared, and it was possible openly to relieve one's feelings, than Val began striding back and forth with clinched hands and a look of concentrated rage.
He was rather startled at the transformation in the sunny face. It was convulsed, ugly with passion.
"I won't stand it; no, I wouldn't stand it from the Angel Gabriel!" She took a turn up and down the room and burst out afresh: "She, Pallas Athene! She, patron of the arts! It's this sort of thing"—she stopped before her cousin with tragic eyes—"it's this sort of thing that has embittered my youth!"
"What!" he said, holding fast to his gravity. "Has she done this before?"