“Is it true?” Rose asked.
“Well, yes,” said the old man in a perfectly natural tone of dubious consideration, “it’s a fairly accurate statement.”
“Oh, papa,” cried his daughter, “how could you have done it? How could you have done such a thing? Such a hateful, horrible thing.”
“Horrible thing?” he repeated with an air of almost naïve astonishment. “What’s horrible about it?”
“You know. I don’t have to tell you; you know. Don’t say to me that you don’t think it’s horrible. Don’t make me feel as if we were suddenly thousands of miles apart.”
The Bonanza King knew that in many matters, in most matters involving questions of ethics, they were more thousands of miles apart than she even now suspected. That was one of the reasons why he would have liked to kill Berny, who, for the first time, had brought this dissimilarity in their points of view to his daughter’s unwilling consideration. He spoke slowly and vaguely to gain time. He knew it was a critical moment in the relations between himself and the one creature in the world he loved.
“I don’t want you to feel that way, dearie,” he said easily. “Maybe there are things in this matter you don’t know about or understand. And, anyway, what’s there so horrible in trying to separate a man and woman who are unhappily married and can’t bear the sight of each other?”
“You were separating them for me,” she said in a low voice.
“Well, now,” he answered with a slight rocking movement of his shoulders and a manner of almost bluff deprecation, “I can say that I wasn’t, but suppose I was?”
She paid no attention to the last part of the sentence, and replied,