“I am Linda Strong, the younger daughter of Alexander Strong. I think you knew my father.”
“Yes,” said the Judge, “I knew him very well indeed, and I have some small acquaintance with his daughter through very interesting reports that my son brings home.”
“Yes, it is about Donald that I came to see you,” said Linda.
If she had been watching as her father would have watched, Linda would have seen the slight uplift of the Judge’s figure, the tensing of his muscles, the narrowing of his eyes in the swift, speculative look he passed over her from the crown of her bare, roughened black head down the gold-brown of her dress to her slender, well-shod feet. The last part of that glance Linda caught. She slightly lifted one of the feet under inspection, thrust it forward and looked at the Judge with a gay challenge in her dark eyes.
“Are you interested in them too?” she asked.
The Judge was embarrassed. A flush crept into his cheeks. He was supposed to be master of any emergency that might arise, but one had arisen in connection with a slip of a schoolgirl that left him wordless.
“It is very probable,” said Linda, “that if my shoes had been like most other girls’ shoes I wouldn’t be here to-day. I was in the same schoolroom with your son for three years, and he never saw me or spoke to me until one day he stopped me to inquire why I wore the kind of shoes I did. He said he had a battle to wage with me because I tried to be a law to myself, and he wanted to know why I wasn’t like other girls. And I told him I had a crow to pick with him because he had the kind of brain that would be content to let a Jap beat him in his own school, in his own language and in his own country; so we made an engagement to fight to a finish, and it ended by his becoming the only boy friend I have and the nicest boy friend a girl ever had, I am very sure. That’s why I’m here.”
Linda lifted her eyes and Judge Whiting looked into them till he saw the same gold lights in their depths that Peter Morrison had seen. He came around the table and placed a big leather chair for Linda. Then he went back and resumed his own.
“Of course,” said the Judge in his most engaging manner. “I gather from what Donald has told me that you have a reason for being here, and I want you to understand that I am intensely interested in anything you have to say to me. Now tell me why you came.”
“I came,” said Linda, “because I started something and am afraid of the possible result. I think very likely if, in retaliation for what Donald said to me about my hair and my shoes, I had not twitted him about the use he was making of his brain and done everything in my power to drive him into competition with Oka Sayye in the hope that a white man would graduate with the highest honours, he would not have gone into this competition, which I am now certain has antagonized Oka Sayye.”