“Oh! he never!” said Mrs. Butterworth, stung to defend Walter, though secretly in sympathy with much of her passionate distortion of his motives.
“He did! He said I was to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ and now he says I shan’t. He isn’t tired of his experiments yet.”
“I’m sure he means it for your good.”
“Yes. Father’s licked me saying that and loving me I’m being kept down for his pleasure and I’m tired if he isn’t. I’m going back to the streets.”
“That’s foolish talk, Mary.”
“I’m going to sing somewhere. That may be foolish, but it’s fact.”
“Well, I’ll tell him. Now eat your breakfast.”
“No,” said Mary Ellen, hunger-striker, and Mrs. Butterworth reported a total failure in guarded misquotation of the rebel. “I can put bacon before her, but I cannot make her eat. And she’ll run away. She will, as sure as eggs are eggs, and you’ll lose her then. We can’t lock her up.”
“No.” Walter mused upon the authority of a foster-father, clamping his anger down, recognizing the weakness of his position. He was not her guardian; he had no reason to suppose that her parents were alive or that any one had better right than he had to command her, but he had assumed possession of Mary Ellen as if she were a kitten and a girl was not a kitten. He could only rule by the consent of the ruled, and he thought he had earned her consent. He had given her so much—even, treating her as of discreet age, his confidence—and he had thought she had responded, he had thought she had reasonably understood what he was doing and why. But if she put it that he was simply a tyrant, there was nothing to do but to humor her till, in time, she saw indisputably that he was right. To let her go, to lose what had been so well begun, was unthinkable.
Mrs. Butterworth, sensitive to Walter’s suffering, broke in upon his thoughts. “I’d like to whip the thankless brat,” she said viciously, and if she was hinting at a policy it might have been a sound one. But Walter was not thinking whether Mary Ellen was or was not still of whipable age, he was going back, whimsically, to his beginnings with her, he was thinking how he had said to Tom, “If she goes on to where I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on me.” The boot-wiping had begun before he looked for it; that was all except that it was his system on which she wiped her boots, his system off which she rubbed the bloom.