"Then you'll like me more, for I'm going to be very straight," he warned her. He looked about for any kind of a cool seat, but subsided into a linen-covered feather-bed of a chair, close to the bust of Mr. Andrew Payton; his eye-glasses on their black ribbon dangling in a thread of sunshine, sent faint lights back and forth on the ceiling. "Life is very dull for your mother," he said, fanning himself with his hat; "why don't you come in oftener?"
Frederica, on the piano-stool, struck a careless octave. "Life dull? Why, I think it's wildly exciting! As for coming in, I'm too busy."
"Reforming the world? You might begin the reformation by making things happier here. Happiness is a valuable reformatory agent. You could cheer Mrs. Payton up, but you prefer 'being busy.'"
Fred colored. He had spoken to her once before in this same peremptory way, and she had been angry; now she was embarrassed. "I'm on my job. I've started a suffrage league—"
"There are other people who can start leagues. There is only one person who can make your mother happy."
"Mr. Weston, the relative value of picture puzzles and the emancipation of women—"
That made him really indignant; he stopped fanning himself and looked at her with hard eyes. "The doing of the immediate duty by each individual woman will emancipate the sex a good deal quicker than talking! You needn't stop your suffrage work to do your duty as a daughter. Did you ever hear anything about bearing one another's burdens?"
"Sounds like the Bible," Fred said.
"It is. I commend the book as a course in sociology."
"But," she defended herself, "I do come home quite often. I'm going to be here to-night. I'm going to a dinner dance at the Country Club, and I'm coming back here to stay all night."