The anger on the old man’s face harshened. “If you were my own flesh and blood,” he said sternly, “I would flog that French impudence of yours to death. As long as you eat my bread, you will obey me.”
She looked at him with covert mockery on her full lips.
“I’m not a child any longer,” she said as she turned flauntingly away; “I could earn my bread easier than by dusting tumble-down book-shelves. Do you think I don’t know that?”
To William Godwin this defiant untutored girl had been a thorn in the side—a perpetual slur and affront to the irksome discipline he laid upon his own pliant Mary, the child of that first wife whose loss had warped his manhood. Now he saw her as a live danger, a flagrant menace whose wildness would infect his own daughter. It was this red-lipped vixen who was teaching her the spirit of disobedience!
He raised his voice and called sharply: “Mary!”
There was no answer, and he shuffled down the shabby hall to the street door. The old man glowered at the slender, beardless figure of the youth who stood with her—the brown, long coat with curling lamb’s-wool collar and cuffs, its pockets bulging with mysterious books. In a senile rage, he ordered his daughter indoors.
Passers-by stopped to stare at the object of his rancor, standing uncertainly in the semi-dusk, a brighter apparition, with luminous eyes and extravagant locks. Words came thickly to the old man; he launched into invective, splenetic and intemperate, at which the listeners tittered.
As it chanced, a pedestrian heard the name he mouthed—a man sharp-featured and ill dressed. With a low whistle he drew a soiled slip of paper from his pocket and consulted it by a street lamp, his grimy forefinger running down the list of names it contained.
“I thought so. I’ve a knack for names,” he muttered, and shouldered through the bystanders.
“Not so fast, young master,” he said, laying his hand on the youth’s arm; “t’other’s the way to the Fleet.”