His companion, as she paused for accommodation, showed him a large flat grave face in which the general intention of deference seemed somehow to confess that it was often at the mercy—and perhaps most in this particular relation—of such an inward habit of the far excursion as could but incorrigibly qualify for Rosanna Gaw certain of the forms of attention, certain of the necessities of manner. She was, sketchily speaking, so much higher-piled a person than her father that the filial attitude in her suffered at the best from the occasional air of her having to come down to him. You would have guessed that she was not a person to cultivate that air; and perhaps even if very acute would have guessed some other things bearing on the matter from the little man's careful way with her. This pair exhibited there in the great light of the summer Sunday morning more than one of the essential, or perhaps the rather finally constituted, conditions of their intercourse. Here was a parent who clearly appealed to nobody in the world but his child, and a child who condescended to nobody in the world but her parent; and this with the anomaly of a constant care not to be too humble on one side and an equal one not to be too proud on the other. Rosanna, her powerful exposed arm raised to her broad shoulder, slowly made her heavy parasol revolve, flinging with it a wide shadow that enclosed them together, for their question and answer, as in a great bestreamered tent. "Do I strike you as worked up? Why I've tried to keep as quiet about it as I possibly could—as one does when one wants a thing so tremendously much."
His eyes had been raised to her own, but after she had said this in her perfunctory way they sank as from a sense of shyness and might have rested for a little on one of their tent-pegs. "Well, daughter, that's just what I want to understand—your personal motive."
She gave a sigh for this, a strange uninforming sigh. "Ah father, 'my personal motives'—!"
With this she might have walked on, but when he barred the way it was as if she could have done so but by stepping on him. "I don't complain of your personal motives—I want you to have all you're entitled to and should like to know who's entitled to more. But couldn't you have a reason once in a while for letting me know what some of your reasons are?"
Her decent blandness dropped on him again, and she had clearly this time come further to meet him. "You've always wanted me to have things I don't care for—though really when you've made a great point of it I've often tried. But want me now to have this." And then as he watched her again to learn what "this," with the visibly rare importance she attached to it, might be: "To make up to a person for a wrong I once did him."
"You wronged the man who has come?"
"Oh dreadfully!" Rosanna said with great sweetness.
He evidently held that any notice taken of anyone, to whatever effect, by this great daughter of his was nothing less than an honour done, and probably overdone; so what preposterous "wrong" could count? The worst he could think of was still but a sign of her greatness. "You wouldn't have him round——?"
"Oh that would have been nothing!" she laughed; and this time she sailed on again.