“I did it all for you,” she confided frankly. “Hid the—uh—underpinnings.”
“But good Scotland, girl!” he replied. “That’s not the way to please me! Oh, it’s glorious. Goodness! You are stunning! But you always upset me when you—uh—go without—uh—underpinnings, you know. Disconcerts me.” His tone was that of the older-man-joking-with-little-girl; but his eyes shone with admiration. “Makes me think I ought to treat you the way—eh—I ought to be ashamed of myself for wanting to. If you’d only giggle or simper—things you never do, thank Peter!—it would give me the cue, occasionally.”
“I see you are impressed,” she smiled and tapped him on the arm. “That’s what I did it for—just that.... You’ve got the wrong idea about fifteen and sixteen. Older persons always do. Fifteen and sixteen don’t feel at all childlike, I can tell you. I’ll never be any older than I am now. My mind’s grown up—”
“‘I do not wear motley in my brain, madonna,’” he quoted the wise clown, Feste.
“That’s just it,” comprehending; “and it’s insufferable to dress us the way they do—skirts that are neither long nor short, hair hanging or half brought up with ribbons. And,” she whispered, “you get positively ashamed of your—underpinnings. I’ve let out the hem of some of my skirts myself—on the quiet. You don’t know how comfortable and at home I feel in this.” She took several easy steps forward and back. “But mother won’t listen to me. I’d be grown up from now on if she’d let me.”
Others of the party were swarming out on the porch. Kate was coming forward to claim her partner.
“Listen, mon capitaine,” Gorgas spoke hurriedly. “I want to have a powwow with you. Stay a few moments after the others are gone; will you?”
He agreed, hardly comprehending what she had said. Her eyes were searching him as of old and her hand was ever so lightly touching his arm. All convention to the contrary, she was a woman, no doubt; but it was the delightful childlike quality about her that really thrilled him. He was thinking, now that she looked so stately and poised, how, after all, it was as a child that she appealed to him. A strong, painful desire swept him to have just such a brood of his own about him. His impulses were domestic and parental, and he was twenty-six and childless.
Kate was talking to him and he was answering with one-half of his mind. The other half was following Gorgas as she swept across the porch and onto the lawn to claim her partner, Ed Morris. Morris was offering an arm grotesquely in tribute to her long skirts. They marched off gaily.
That’s the way she would go, he tried to assure himself. Some chap of her own generation would take her away, and then she would be lost. It was the fate of parents to lose their offspring. Real fathers, however, had rights and claims. They could put their arms about their daughters, pat their cheeks and listen to their prattle, no matter who else owned them; and there would be no horrid suspicions about the matter. As he heard the ripples of laughter that came from their confidential talks out on the lawn, he had a little pang of regret. “Mon père,” he remembered how she had once dubbed him. “Mon père,” he nodded to himself, “is about to lose his enfant; and it isn’t at all a pleasant sensation.... It’s like pups,” he grinned. “There’s no use trying to own them. You get your affection all tied up and then they die and you have to begin all over with a new lot. The thing to do is to give ’em away quick and forget ’em.”