"I'm to regard this as an arraignment?" smiling.
"Arraignment, Papa?"
"Of my American fatherhood? That I've allowed my womenkind to usurp my prerogatives? That it's being borne in on you and me, that somehow we've been kept out of our rights in each other?"
Selina hesitated. Then, "Papa, may I ask you something else?"
"It's because you haven't, we're both complaining."
"It's this," her color came and went a little rapidly, but she stood to her colors; "since you did settle this matter with Cousin Anna, don't you think it was only fair to have told Mamma and me?"
"Is indictment added to arraignment, Selina? Culpable as a husband as well as a father?"
"Papa, I didn't say so." She threw herself on him, this fair-haired daughter, and went to crying with her face and tears on his poor innocent shirt-front, and her arm around his neck. It was sweet to have her there, and so new and rare a thing for him to see anything but the veriest surface of her nature, that he was willing to take the toll of her tears from her to receive the rest.
Selina was a creature of many moods these days. She said she wanted work and when it came she acted as badly as possible about it.