This reflection was lost on Mr. Fontaine, whose thoughts had switched to another line. He reminded Claude of the party they were to attend on the Armstrong estate in Huntington, Long Island.
"Can't you lunch with me at one, Claude?" he asked in an excellent humor. "Then we'll take the train together."
"I'm sorry, father, but I have another engagement this afternoon."
He elaborated the urgency of the matter with an anxiety that Mr. Fontaine was quick to detect.
"An invitation from Armstrong Hall, Claude, is like an invitation from Windsor Castle," he said, smiling. "It cancels all previous matters except matters of life and death."
"I never felt less like breaking my word," countered the younger man obstinately.
Mr. Fontaine did not press the point. His easy life and lucrative business had enabled him to cultivate certain expensive reticences. It pained him to drive anyone into a corner. As regards the three stages of paternal activity—the interrogative, the declarative and the imperative—he held that a competent father need rarely go beyond the first two. Besides, he had found by experience that, if he took a determined stand, his son frequently yielded to the mere pressure of silent expectation.
Mr. Fontaine, who had been a widower for ten years, habitually gave great latitude to Claude, his only son, of whom he was genuinely fond. He frankly made "keeping up appearances" the basis of all conduct. Apart from that, he had a naive Rousselian theory of education, to the effect that, if you let a young man indulge all his whims and passions to the top of his bent, he will settle down at thirty or thereabouts to a sane and steady career.
As refined tastes and good physical habits came natural to Claude, the operation of this theory had done him no bodily harm; but it had trained him to an exaggerated concern for his own desires and an enormous ignorance of other people's. Opposition to his stronger wishes was so rare that, when it occurred, he was tempted to regard it as wicked, and hence to crush it with a close approach to a feeling of self-righteousness. To put it shortly, he had the makings of a first-class tyrant, and he would have become a vicious one if his will had been as pronounced as his desires.
"You haven't had a tiff with Marjorie?" asked the father, with a casual air.