“I thought as much. Now I’ve told you as plainly as I know how that you’ve got to drop that fellow. He’s a scoundrel to force his attentions on you. I haven’t wanted to bring matters to an issue with you about him. I’ve been patient with you—let him come to the house and go about with you. But you’ve not played fair with me. When I told you I didn’t like his coming to the house so much you began meeting him when you thought I wouldn’t know it—that’s a fact, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Dada—only a few times, though.”
“May I ask what you mean by that? That a girl brought up as you have been, with every advantage and indulgence, should be so basely ungrateful as to meet a man I disapprove of—meet him in ways that show you know you’re doing a wrong thing—is beyond my understanding. It’s contemptible; it’s close upon the unpardonable!”
“Then why don’t you act decently about it?” She lifted her head and met his gaze unwaveringly. “If you didn’t hear what I said I’ll tell you! I told him I love him; I’ve promised to marry him.”
“Well, you won’t marry him!” he exclaimed, his voice quavering in his effort to restrain his anger. “A man who’s left a wife somewhere and plays upon the sympathy of a credulous young girl like you is a contemptible hound!”
“All right, then! He’s a contemptible hound!”
Her insolence, her refusal to cower before him, increased his anger. His time-tried formula for meeting emergencies by superior strategy—the method that worked so well with his son—was of no use to him here. He had lost a point in letting her see that for once in his life his temper had got the better of him. He had been too tolerant of her faults; the bills for his indulgence were coming in now—a large sheaf of them. She must be handled with care—with very great caution, indeed; thus far in his life he had got what he wanted, and it was not for a girl whom he saw only as a spoiled child to circumvent him.
But he realized at this moment that Leila was no longer a child. She was not only a woman, but a woman it would be folly to attempt to drive or frighten. He was alarmed by the composure with which she waited for the further disclosure of his purposes, standing with her back against the service shelf, eyeing him half hostilely, half, he feared, with a hope that he would carry the matter further and open his guard for a thrust he was not prepared to parry. He was afraid of her, but she must not know that he was afraid.
He took off his hat and let it swing at arm’s length as he considered how to escape with dignity from the corner into which she had forced him. Sentiment is a natural refuge of the average man when other resources fail. He smiled benevolently, and with a quick lifting of the head remarked:
“This isn’t the way for us to talk to each other. We’ve always been the best of friends; nothing’s going to change that. I trust your good sense—I trust”—here his voice sank under the weight of emotion—“I trust your love for me—your love for your dear mother’s memory—to do nothing to grieve me, nothing that would hurt her.”