Sometimes, however, when there were other men in the house, Porter would come and stand in the door and regard them good-humoredly, and nod to them amiably, usually with his cigar in his mouth and the evening newspaper in his hand. When there was a good deal of laughing he would go over and gaze upon them questioningly and quiz them; but they usually felt the restraint of his presence. If they repeated to him some story which had prompted their mirth, he was wont to rebuke them with affected seriousness, or he would tell them a story of his own. He expected Evelyn to receive a great deal of attention. He liked to know who her callers were and where she herself visited, and it pleased him that she had called on all her mother's old friends, whether they had been to see her or not. He had a sense of the dignities and proprieties of life, and he felt his own prestige as a founder of the town; it would have been a source of grief to him if Evelyn had not taken a leading place among its young people.
The theater was the one diversion that appealed to him, and he liked to take Evelyn with him, and wanted her to sit in a box so that he might show her off to better advantage. He could not understand why she preferred seats in the orchestra; Timothy Margrave and his daughter always sat in a box, and young men were forever running in to talk to Mabel between the acts. Porter thought that this showed a special deference to the Margrave girl, as he called her, and for her father too, by implication, and he resented anything that looked like a slight upon Evelyn. He was afraid that she did not entertain enough, and since the girls who visited them in the fall had left, he had been insisting that she must have others come to see her. He had made her tell him about all the girls she had known in college; his curiosity in such directions was almost insatiable. He always demanded to know what their fathers did for a livelihood, and he had been surprised to find that so many of Evelyn's classmates had been daughters of inconspicuous families, and that the young women were in many cases fitting themselves to teach. He had pretty thoroughly catalogued all of Evelyn's college friends, and he suggested about once a week that she have some of them out.
Sometimes, after Evelyn's callers had gone, she and her father sat and talked in the library.
"I don't see what you young people can find to say so much about," he would say; or: "What was Warry gabbling about so long?"
She always told him what had been talked about, with a careful frankness, lest he might imagine that the visits of Wheaton or Warry, or any one else, had a special intention. She crossed over to the library one night after several callers had left, and found her father more absorbed than usual in a mass of papers which lay on the large table before him. He put down his glasses and lay back in his chair wearily.
"Well, girl, is it time to go to bed? Sit down there and tell me the news."
"There isn't anything worth telling; you know there isn't much information in the average caller." He yawned and rubbed his eyes and paid no attention to her answer. He had asked a few days before whether she cared to go to Chicago to hear the opera, and she had said that she would go if he would; and he now wished to talk this out with her.
"The Whipples are going over to Chicago for the opera," he ventured.
"But you're not getting ready to back out! You ought to be ashamed of yourself." She rose and went toward him menacingly, and he put up his hands as if to ward off her attack.
"But you can have just as much fun with the general as you could with me."