“Does Mrs. Levering know you have come?” he asked, full of the proprieties.
She sang a bar of a popular hit.
“Do you know what you’re about?
Does your mother know you’re out?
“I didn’t say exactly where I was going; I don’t think I did,” she turned reflectively. “Why should I?”
He tried to explain. She was still a child, seventeen years old, he told her.
“I’m eighteen the tenth of this month, and that’s tomorrow,” she corrected.
He knew that. Still—he argued further.
“Why will you persist in looking down on me?” she stamped her foot, just like a child. “I’ve been on my own since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I’m making my own living; I do a man’s work and, by your own Horn Spoon, I can take care of myself. Look here: yesterday afternoon I sunned myself in the Common on a bench—”
“Heavens!” he muttered.