The rector reached up and took her hand. She cared more than she would admit, he saw. She had thought the thing out, perhaps in the long night—when he slept placidly. Thought and suffered, he surmised. And again he remembered his worldly plans for her, and felt justly punished.
“I suppose it is hard for a father to understand how any one can know his little girl and not love her. Or be the better for it.”
She kissed him and slid off the arm of his chair.
“Don't you worry,” she said cheerfully. “I had to make an ideal for myself about somebody. Every girl does. Sometimes it's the plumber. It doesn't really matter who it is, so you can pin your dreams to him. The only thing that hurts is that Graham wasn't worth while.”
She went back to her little cards, but some ten minutes later the rector, lost in thought, heard the scratching of her pen cease.
“Did you ever think, daddy,” she said, “of the influence women have over men? Look at the Spencers. Mrs. Spencer spoiling Graham, and making her husband desperately unhappy. And—”
“Unhappy? What makes you think that?”
“He looks unhappy.”
The rector was startled. He had an instant vision of Clayton Spencer, tall, composed, handsome, impeccably clothed. He saw him in the setting that suited him best, the quiet elegance of his home. Clayton unhappy! Nonsense. But he was uneasy, too. That very gravity which he had noticed lately, that was certainly not the gravity of an entirely happy man. Clayton had changed, somehow. Was there trouble there? And if there were, why?
The rector, who reduced most wretchedness to terms of dollars and cents, of impending bills and small deprivations found himself at a loss.