Mr. Dormer-Smith was not a ready or flexible man by nature; and it took him a minute or so to alter the sight, so to speak, of the big gun he had been getting into position to mow down May's resistance against making a splendid marriage.
"Why—eh? Oh, Mrs. Dobbs's allowance! Oh yes. Well, my dear, you have pretty well answered your own question. If you had known, you would not have consented to come to town, and take your proper place in society. Your aunt considered it most important that you should do so. And I'm sure, May, you must allow that she has done her very best for you in every way."
"Her very best!" thought May; "yes, perhaps!" Then she said aloud, "Aunt Pauline has been very kind to me. But how could there be any 'proper place' for me in society, unless I could honestly afford to take it? To get it by imposing privations on my grandmother, who is not bound, except by her own abundant goodness, to do anything for me at all—this surely could not be right or just, could it?"
Mr. Dormer-Smith was not prepared with a cogent answer on the spur of the moment. So he fell back on murmuring some faint echoes of his wife's maxims about "duty to society." But he had not Pauline's sincere convictions on the subject, and did it but feebly.
"And, oh, Uncle Frederick," proceeded May; "what a mean impostor I have been all this time!"
"Impostor, my dear? No, no; that's nonsense, you know."
He was rather relieved to find May talking nonsense. That seemed much more normal and natural in a girl of her age than being so deuced logical and high-strung, and that sort of thing.
"That," he repeated firmly, "is really nonsense."
"But, Uncle Frederick, I was appearing before everybody under false pretences. People thought—I thought myself—that my father supplied all my expenses."
Mr. Dormer-Smith pursed up his mouth and puffed out his breath with a little contemptuous sound. Then he answered—