“Oh, don’t call her that!” cried Feather. “My daughter! It sounds as if she were eighteen!” She felt as if she had a sudden hideous little shock. Six years had passed since Bob died! A daughter! A school girl with long hair and long legs to keep out of the way. A grown-up girl to drag about with one. Never would she do it!
“Three sixes are eighteen,” Coombe continued, “as was impressed upon one in early years by the multiplication table.”
“I never saw you so interested in anything before,” Feather faltered. “Climbing steep, narrow, horrid stairs to her nursery! Dismissing her nurse!” She paused a second, because a very ugly little idea had clutched at her. It arose from and was complicated with many fantastic, half formed, secret resentments of the past. It made her laugh a shade hysterical.
“Are you going to see that she is properly brought up and educated, so that if—anyone important falls in love with her she can make a good match?”
Hers was quite a hideous little mind, he was telling himself—fearful in its latter day casting aside of all such small matters as taste and feeling. People stripped the garments from things in these days. He laughed inwardly at himself and his unwitting “these days.” Senile severity mouthed just such phrases. Were they not his own days and the outcome of a past which had considered itself so much more decorous? Had not boldly questionable attitudes been held in those other days? How long was it since the Prince Regent himself had flourished? It was only that these days brought it all close against one’s eyes. But this exquisite creature had a hideous little mind of her own whatsoever her day.
Later, he confessed to himself that he was unprepared to see her spring to her feet and stand before him absurdly, fantastically near being impassioned.
“You think I am too silly to see anything,” she broke forth. “But I do see—a long way sometimes. I can’t bear it but I do—I do! I shall have a grown-up daughter. She will be the kind of girl everyone will look at—and someone—important—may want to marry her. But, Oh!—” He was reminded of the day when she had fallen at his feet, and clasped his rigid and reluctant knees. This was something of the same feeble desperation of mood. “Oh, why couldn’t someone like that have wanted to marry me! See!” she was like a pathetic fairy as she spread her nymphlike arms, “how pretty I am!”
His gaze held her a moment in the singular fashion with which she had become actually familiar, because—at long intervals—she kept seeing it again. He quite gently took her fingers and returned her to her sofa.
“Please sit down again,” he requested. “It will be better.”
She sat down without another imbecile word to say. As for him, he changed the subject.