IV
His intimate relations with the growing girl remained constant. He would make the same remarks, pinch her blooming cheeks, pat her head, and kiss her smooth forehead.
"How's my pet this morning?"
"Quite all right, daddy, thank you."
"Gettin' on nicely with your lessons?"
"Oh yes."
Once, when she was five years old, he had soundly smacked her. The sprite had discovered the efficacy of tears as a solvent of difficulties. Whenever her little will was crossed she howled. She howled as if she enjoyed it, and her father was shrewd enough to know this. One morning he caught her up, laid her across his knee, and spanked her till his hand ached. Next day Posy smiled very sweetly at him, and said reproachfully:
"Daddy pank a Posy too hard."
But she stopped howling.
He was well pleased when she began to make friends with people like the Honeybuns. Honeybun was an ubiquitous Socialist who slept at Clapham. Like Quinney, he had soared. The two men had nothing in common except this, but it was a bond between them. Mrs. Honeybun had been a governess in the family of a nobleman. She, too, had soared into an empyrean of advanced thinkers and workers. Familiarity with the titled classes had bred contempt for them. In and out of season she denounced the luxury and indolence of an effete aristocracy. Her own household was managed abominably. She preached and practised the virtues of an Edenic diet. Butcher's meat was spoken of scathingly as the source of most physical and moral infirmities. Apart from this prejudice against flesh-pots and aristocrats, she was a kindly woman, over-zealous as a reformer, displaying a too tempestuous petticoat, but burning with ardour to ameliorate the condition of the poor and oppressed.