"What arrangements would you make about your mother? It seems to me that your mother needs your attention."
"Of course I couldn't leave mother. If you agree to it, John Henry is willing to come here to live as long as I have to look after her. If not, I shall take her away with me; I have spoken to her, and she is perfectly willing to go."
The ten years which had left Cyrus at a standstill had developed his daughter from a girl into a woman. She spoke with the manner of one who realizes that she holds the situation in her hands, and he yielded to this assumption of strength as he would have yielded ten years ago had she been clever enough to use it against him. It was his own manner in a more attractive guise, if he had only known it; and the Treadwell determination to get the thing it wanted most was asserting itself in Susan's desire to win John Henry quite as effectively as it had asserted itself in Cyrus's passion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad. Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus, it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the power to command events.
"Take your mother away?" he repeated. "Why, where on earth would you take her?"
"Then you'll have to agree to John Henry's coming here. It won't make any difference to you, of course. You needn't see him except at the table."
"But what would James say about it?" he returned, with the cowardice natural to the habitual bully. The girl had character, certainly, and though he disliked character in a woman, he was obliged to admit that she had not failed to make an impression.
"James won't care, and besides," she added magnificently, "it is none of his business."
"And it's none of mine, either, I reckon," said Cyrus, with a chuckle.
"Well, of course, it's more of mine," agreed Susan, and her delicious laugh drowned his chuckle.
She had won her point, and strange to say, she had pleased him rather than otherwise. He had suddenly a comfortable feeling in his digestive organs as well as a sense of virtue in his soul. It was impossible not to feel proud of her as she towered there above him with her superb body, as fine and as supple as the body of a race horse, and her splendid courage that made him wish while he looked at her that she, instead of James, had been born a male. She was not pretty—she had never been pretty—but he realized for the first time that there might be something better even for a woman than beauty.