Phyllis began to cry.
Turning to young Gordon King, the indignant lady added: "I think you are a disreputable boy. You must never come to my house again—never!"
He made no answer and left the car without a word at the door of the King residence.
There were miles and miles of weeping on the way home. Phyllis had recovered her composure but began again when her mother remarked, "I wonder where you learned to drink champagne and cognac and smoke cigarettes," as if her own home had not been a perfect academy of dissipation. The girl sat in a corner, her eyes covered with her handkerchief and the only words she uttered on the way home were these: "Don't tell father!"
While this was happening, Mr. Baker confided his troubles to Judge Crooker in the latter's office. The Judge heard him through and then delivered another notable opinion, to wit: "There are many subjects on which the judgment of the average man is of little value, but in the matter of bringing up a daughter it is apt to be sound. Also there are many subjects on which the judgment of the average woman may be trusted, but in the matter of bringing up a daughter it is apt to be unsound. I say this, after some forty years of observation."
"What is the reason?" Mr. Baker asked.
"Well, a daughter has to be prepared to deal with men," the Judge went on. "The masculine temperament is involved in all the critical problems of her life. Naturally the average man is pretty well informed on the subject of men. You have prospered these late years. You have been so busy getting rich that you have just used your home to eat and sleep in. You can't do a home any good by eating and snoring and reading a paper in it."
"My wife would have her own way there," said Baker.
"That doesn't alter the fact that you have neglected your home. You have let things slide. You wore yourself out in this matter of money-getting. You were tired when you got home at night—all in, as they say. The bank was the main thing with you. I repeat that you let things slide at home and the longer they slide the faster they slide when they're going down hill. You can always count on that in a case of sliding. The young have a taste for velocity and often it comes so unaccountably fast that they don't know what to do with it, so they're apt to get their necks broken unless there's some one to put on the brakes."