"I want something to do," demanded Cora, "something for my mind. You have always treated me like a baby. You've sent me to school and put me out of your thoughts. You don't even talk to me intelligently; I mean that you don't talk to me as if I were intelligent. You talk to Miss Thomasina and Dr. Lister in an entirely different way. I can study as well as Richard and—and as—" but the name of her rival Cora could not pronounce. "I have a better mind than Walter. Walter can't do anything but make money. You should hear him with his friends at Atlantic City, you should hear him only ten minutes! And he wants me to like those people!"
"My dear—"
But Cora had not said all she had to say.
"Mother thinks I have failed because I am not engaged to Richard. He never thought of me. I am convinced that he never thought of me. It has made me appear like a crazy person. I don't know what the Listers think of me."
Then Cora gave her father a shock of many volts. She had not read her padded poets or her Bible in vain. Nor was her paternity entirely without evidence.
"I don't wish to go in solemn procession all my days because of the bitterness of my soul."
For the first time in his life, Dr. Scott's reaction from a thrilling experience was expressed in terms of money. He determined at that instant that his work on Basil Everman's writings must be paid for; he determined, moreover, that henceforth the whole of his salary should not be handed over as heretofore. He put his arm round his weeping daughter.
"Don't cry, Cora! You will have plenty left in life. Sometime you will smile over this trouble. You and I will work together, and by and by we will go abroad."