“Please, papa,—I didn’t mean to be rude!”
Mrs. Blair touched her father’s coat-sleeve lightly with her hand. She loved her brother very dearly, and the effect upon him of this marriage was already, in her vivid imagination, the chief thing in it. She had long felt that her father had given Wayne up; that he believed the passion for drink that took hold of his son at times was in the nature of a disease, to be suffered patiently and borne with Christian fortitude.
Wayne was vexed at his sister’s manner; he disliked contention and there was nothing to be gained by being disagreeable over their father’s marriage. He left the room to find fresh cigarettes and when he came back the air had cleared. Colonel Craighill, anxious on his part to be conciliatory, was laughing at a renewal of Fanny’s cross-questioning.
“Where did Miss Allen attend school?” she was asking.
“I believe she had private teachers,” replied Colonel Craighill, though not positively.
“And she isn’t a teacher herself or a philanthropist? Has she money?”
“She and her mother are, I believe, in comfortable circumstances. I hope that you and Wayne will appreciate the difficulties before this lady in becoming my wife—that she is stepping into a place where she will be criticized unkindly from the very fact of my position here and the disparity in our years and fortunes. I appeal to you, Fanny, as to one woman on behalf of another. You can make her way easy if you will.”
He had, with the best intentions in the world, struck the wrong note. In so many words, he was asking mercy where there had been no accusation. Mrs. Blair had not the slightest intention of committing herself to any policy toward her father’s new wife. So far as the public was concerned she would carry off the situation with outward acceptance and approval; but just now she declined to consider the question in the key her father had sounded. To him she was a frivolous person with unaccountably erratic ways, and with nothing of his own measure or sobriety. She made no reply whatever to his appeal, but chose another bonbon and ate it with exasperating slowness. Wayne saw—as her father did not—that she was angry; but Mrs. Blair fell back upon the half-mocking mood with which she had begun, demanding:
“Is she modish? Does she wear her clothes with an air?”
“I hope,” said Colonel Craighill, betrayed into the least show of resentment by her refusal to meet his question—“I hope, Fanny, that she dresses like a lady.”