Paul scowled and said nothing. His mother had noticed several times of late that there was some kind of dissension between him and his father, but they had never been very friendly, no house being big enough for two absolutely selfish men, and their interests had always clashed. But during the last few weeks this antagonism had seemed to quicken into something more definite, and Mrs. Walbridge wondered vaguely, as she ate her breakfast, what it meant.
Grisel, who was pale, was yet too young to bear in her face any ugly traces of her sleepless night, and she went through the meal with a kind of resolute gaiety. She was full Of her own affairs, and declared her intention of ringing up the girls as soon as she had finished eating, and telling them the news.
"Maud and Moreton will be delighted," she declared. "They liked him so much that night, and he's giving Billy some kind of work, something in the City, that Billy says will be awfully useful to him, because Sir John is so well known. Billy and Hermy were frightfully pleased. Wasn't it kind of him?—of Sir John, I mean."
"Oh, now she's experiencing the joys of patronage," commented Paul, spreading strawberry jam on his toast. "She'll be getting us all little jobs, mother. Oh, hell!"
He was not a young man who used bad language, and his mother was surprised as well as shocked at it. But before she could remonstrate the door opened, and Ferdie came in, pale and tired-looking, with heavy eyes and nervous twitching of his eyebrows, that boded evil things for his companions.
Grisel looked at him sharply, and Paul, turning, fixed his eyes so unswervingly on his father's face that his father snapped at him.
"What the deuce are you glaring at?"
"You," said the young man, coolly. "It's no good, Guv'nor, you can't keep it up at your time of life. You'll be as plain as the rest of us if you go on like this."
His words were not so offensive to his mother as they would have been to most women, as addressed by son to father, for Ferdie Walbridge's character was such that though his children undoubtedly had a certain pride in him because of his good looks, and a kind of affection that was not empty of pity, he had never, even when they were very little children, inspired the least fear or even respect in them.
She looked, however, anxiously from one to the other of the three faces round the table, and was relieved when Grisel, with a little determined air of excitement, held out her left hand, and waved it under her father's swollen, surly eyes.