“No, that isn’t the rub—and I might have known you wouldn’t appreciate anything I tried to do for you. If you keep on, the way you’re going, you’ll have Hal so sick and tired of you that he’ll be glad to get out of reach of the telephone. I tried to make you a little indifferent to him—and got insolence for my pains. If you had a grain of policy, you wouldn’t let him see that you are daft about him. That’s no way to hold a man’s love. I kept Syd Schubert dangling at my belt for four years by letting him half way think I cared.”
“Yes, and you lost Tom Henderson by the same tactics. Tom wanted whole hog or none, and you didn’t get on to the fact till he’d got sick of you.”
“Don’t, for heaven’s sake, use such vulgar expressions. Hal is such a gentleman, I don’t see how he stands you. Eileen, I wish you would see that I am doing this for your own good—and to please mamma. I have had experience, and I know what works with a man, nine times out of ten. I’ll hold Oliver Penrose to the end of the world ... by keeping him guessing. Look at the way mamma has kept papa on his knees for nearly twenty-eight years.”
“You think that a fine thing?” the girl flared. “If you pattern your life after mamma’s, at her age you’ll be as hard and cruel—”
“You outrageous, you impudent—” Words failed. “How do you dare speak that way about your parents? And Theo’s almost as bad. At your age, I never dreamed of being disrespectful, or saying a word back when mamma reproved me.”
“Oh, Sylvia, come off! Mamma says she never talked back to her mother. And then she forgets, and tells the impudent things she used to say—and how her grandmother Larimore took her part against all the rest of the family. But there’s Hal, tooting his horn for me. I’ll ask him to invite you to ride with us some evening next week. I’m sure he’ll be charmed!”