This exchange was followed as usual by a despondent silence which always contained an inaudible accusation of Galt. Everyone would have denied it sweetly. He couldn’t turn it on them. He could only take it out in irritability.
“All fuss and feathers and nothing to do,” he said. “You make me sick. I can’t see why you don’t do what other girls do. There’s nothing they’ve got that you can’t have. Go some place. Go to Newport. That’s where they all go, ain’t it?”
“Papa, dear,” said Natalie, “what should we do at Newport?”
“Do! Do! How the—how do I know? Swim, dance, flirt, whatever the rest of them do. Take a house ... make a splurge ... cut in with the crowd. I don’t know. Your mother does. That’s her business. Ask her.”
“Oh, but you don’t understand,” said Natalie. “We’d not be taken in. Mother does know.”
“What does that mean?” Galt asked.
“You can’t just dress up and go where you want to go,” said Natalie. “You have to be asked. We’d look nice at Newport with a house, wouldn’t we?”
“Go on,” said Galt, in a dazed kind of way.
“I mean,” said Natalie, ... “oh, you know, papa, dear. Don’t be an old stupid. Why go on with it?... Of course you can always do things with people of a sort. They ask you fast enough. But mother says if we do that we’ll never get anywhere. So we have to wait.”
“Wait for what?”