"Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed."
"Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast."
He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack.
"You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to your social responsibilities."
"And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session. And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few crisp sentences. But why all this assumption that I'm not a real lady? There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house—"
Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit into it before looking at her father.
"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world—the world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society. It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well that if it were necessary you would be equal to it—you are equal to anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such things."
"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not very much, anyhow."
She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate prospect of paying.
The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking. When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it circumspectly.