Her eyebrows went up.
“I don’t get you,” she said. “Who circulated it?”
“You did, for one,” he told her. “And he did, for another. I may be failing, what with increasing age and all, but I’m not more than half blind yet. Have you been to your mother with this piece of news?”
“I came to you first. I—I”—for the first time she faltered an instant—“I figured you might be able to get the correct slant a little quicker than she would. This is only the curtain-raiser. I’m saving the big scene with the melodramatic touches for her. I have a feeling that she may be just a trifle difficult. So I picked on something easy to begin with.”
“I see,” he said. “Kind of an undress rehearsal, eh?” He held her off at arm’s length from him, studying her face hungrily. “But what’s the reason your young man didn’t come along with you or ahead of you, in fact? In my time it generally was the young man that brought the message to Garcia.”
“He wanted to come—he wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t let him. I told him I’d been knowing you longer than he had and I could handle the job better by myself. Well, that’s your cue. What’s it going to be, daddy—the glad hand of approval and the parental bless you, my children, bless you, or a little line of that go-forth-ungrateful-hussy-and-never-darken-my-doors-again stuff? Only, we’re a trifle shy on doors around here.”
He drew her to him and spoke downward at the top of her cropped head, she snuggling her face with a quick nervous little jerk against his wool-clad breast.
“Baby,” he said, “when all’s said and done, the whole thing’s up to you, way I look at it. I don’t suppose there ever was a man who really loved his daughter but what he figured that, taking one thing with another, she was too good for any man on earth. No matter who the lucky candidate is he says to himself: ‘Well, if I have to have a son-in-law I suppose maybe you’ll do, but alongside of her you’re a total loss.’ That’s what any father who’s worth his salt is bound to think. And that’s what I’d still think no matter who you picked out. I’m not saying now what sort of a husband I’d try to pick out for you if the choice had been left to me. I’d probably want to keep you an old maid so’s I could have you around and then I’d secretly despise myself for doing it, too. What I’m saying is this: If you’re certain you know your own mind and if you’ve decided that this boy is the boy you want, why what more is there for me to do except maybe to ask you just one or two small questions?”
“Shoot!” she bade, without looking up, but her arms hugged him a little tighter. “Probably one of the nicest old meal-tickets in the world,” she added, confidentially addressing the top buttonhole of his sweater.
“Has it by any chance entered into your calculations at this early stage of the game, how you are going to live—you two? Or where? Or, if I may be so bold, what on?”