So that was it!
“He came and talked to me.”
“Ye—e—es.” Mr. Stanley considered. “Well, I don’t want you to talk to him,” he said, very firmly.
Ann Veronica paused before she answered. “Don’t you think I ought to?” she asked, very submissively.
“No.” Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the house. “He is not—I don’t like him. I think it inadvisable—I don’t want an intimacy to spring up between you and a man of that type.”
Ann Veronica reflected. “I HAVE—had one or two talks with him, daddy.”
“Don’t let there be any more. I—In fact, I dislike him extremely.”
“Suppose he comes and talks to me?”
“A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she cares to do it. She—She can snub him.”
Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.