“Oh, Pa! Do you really mean it, Pa?” she said incredulously.
“Now look here, I’ll smack you, Lily! When your Pa tells you a thing!”
Lily seemed a princess, with her way of saying, “’K you,” of touching the ornaments, the watches, like a little creature thirsting for luxury and yielding to her inclination at the first opportunity. There was so great a look of happiness in her eyes; and Clifton was so proud of his Lily, that he offered her a chain as well, to go with the watch. Lily refused at first, for form’s sake, and then took courage—like a poor little martyr who did not like to disoblige her Pa—and chose a very pretty watch-chain, to the great wonderment of the Three Graces and of Nunkie, who thought, as they left the shop, that the children of to-day ... upon his word ... the parents of to-day ... it was all very different in his time....
Clifton laughed to himself at that old curmudgeon as he left him to go home, with his star. Lily hung heavily on her father’s arm, passed the draper’s shops with a serious air.
“No, another time!” said Pa, who felt what she was after.
And he hurried his daughter off, for he might have yielded, she was so nice.
Lily set her watch in Piccadilly, as they passed; then at the Café de l’Europe, by the big clock at the back; and again, twenty steps farther, at the bar of the Crown. Lily looked at the time and Pa showed his Lily off. He was proud to be seen with her in the neighborhood of Lisle Street, where everybody knew him. True, he seemed to have the name of being hard with Lily. But, come, was he hard? Did she look like a martyr? It was preposterous, all those stories. And he redoubled his attentions to his daughter, who talked a heap of nonsense, asked funny questions:
“Why should writing a letter interfere with the trapeze, when a girl has arms harder than a horse’s hocks?”
“What? What?” asked Pa, taken aback, and when he understood, he would have held his sides for laughing, if he had been at home:
“Oh, the old rogue!” he said admiringly. “He loves his dear girls, does Nunkie!”