Mahlon Spellman stood very still. He wanted to say something scathing. He had intended to be extremely severe about his daughter doing such an unprecedented thing as to remove her petticoat on the street. He wanted to tell her that she should be ashamed to accept help from anything so low down in the social world as a Susanna. But some way, memory performed a kaleidoscopic jump, so that he saw himself in crucial moments looking anxiously toward the slate of some of his fellow pupils. Then it struck Mahlon like a blow that he never, in his life before, had admitted even to himself that he had done this; but Mahala was facing him with perfectly frank eyes, acknowledging her obligations.
What he said was not in the very least what he had contemplated saying.
“The next time you feel that you owe any one a petticoat, come and tell me,” he said. “There are some suitable ones of heavy stamped felt in dark colours that many of the girls of Susanna’s age and size are wearing. It is scarcely fair to your mother that hours of painstaking work she has spent upon you, in an effort to express her love for you, should be discarded by you without a thought of her.”
Mahala’s eager face showed deep concentration.
“If that’s the way you and Mama feel about it, Papa,” she said quietly, “I’ll pay for one of the felt skirts from my monthly allowance, and I’ll go to-morrow and ask Susanna to accept it instead of Mother’s beautiful work. Certainly I didn’t intend to hurt Mother’s feelings or yours.”
Now this was precisely the thing that Mahlon Spellman had determined that Mahala should do, yet when she, herself, proposed making that trip, it touched his egotism from an entirely different point of view. He felt soiled and contaminated, even at the thought of such a thing, when he really came to picture his daughter, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, as being placed in such a humiliating position.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” he said grandiloquently.
The strain on his tiptoes was crucial, the gesture that ran through his flattened hair raised it beautifully.
“You must learn to think before you do a thing in this world,” he admonished Mahala. “I should consider it distinctly humiliating to me, to have a daughter of mine go and ask to be given back a gift that she had seen fit to make. Since Susanna has the petticoat, she must keep it. Simply fix in your consciousness the idea that the next time my daughter is not to be like the foolish little grasshopper that refused to look before it leaped, and so found itself in trouble.”
There was a bewildered look in Mahala’s eyes. Her teeth were set rather hard on her under lip. The breath she drew was deep. She turned from her father and laid her hand upon the door.