“Papa,” said Constance, “I am going to make a suggestion which is a very bold one; perhaps you will be angry—but I don’t do it to make you angry; and, please, don’t answer me till you have thought a moment. It is just this—Why shouldn’t we go home?”
“Go home!” The words flew from him in the shock and wonder. He grew pale as he stared at her, too much thunderstruck to be angry, as she said.
Constance put up her hand to stop him. “I said, please don’t answer till you have thought.”
And then they sat for a minute or more looking at each other from opposite sides of the table—in that pause which comes when a new and strange thought has been thrown into the midst of a turmoil which it has power to excite or to allay. Waring went through a great many phases of feeling while he looked at his young daughter sitting undaunted opposite to him, not afraid of him, treating him as no one else had done for years—as an equal, as a reasonable being, whose wishes were not to be deferred to superstitiously, but whose reasons for what he did and said were to be put to the test, as in the case of other men. And he knew that he could not beat down this cool and self-possessed girl, as fathers can usually crush the young creatures whom they have had it in their power to reprove and correct from their cradles. Constance was an independent intelligence. She was a gentlewoman, to whom he could not be rude any more than to the Queen. This hushed at once the indignant outcry on his lips. He said at last, calmly enough, with only a little sneer piercing through his forced smile, “We must take care, like other debaters, to define what we mean exactly by the phrases we use. Home, for example. What do you mean by home? My home, in the ordinary sense of the word, is here.”
“My dear father,” said Constance, with the air, somewhat exasperated by his folly, of a philosopher with a neophyte, “I wish you would put the right names to things. Yes, it is quite necessary to define, as you say. How can an Englishman, with all his duties in his own country, deriving his income from it, with houses belonging to him, and relations, and everything that makes up life—how can he, I ask you, say that home, in the ordinary sense of the word, is here? What is the ordinary sense of the word?” she said, after a pause—looking at him with the indignant frown of good sense, and that little air of repressed exasperation, as of the wiser towards the foolisher, which made Waring, in the midst of his own just anger and equally just discomfiture, feel a certain amusement too. He kept his temper with the greatest pains and care. Domenico had left the room when the discussion began, and the lamp which hung over the table lighted impartially the girl’s animated countenance, pressing forward in the strength of a position which she felt to be invulnerable, and the father’s clouded and withdrawing face,—for he had taken his eyes from her, with unconscious cowardice, when she fixed him with that unwavering gaze.
“I will allow that you put the position very strongly—as well as a little undutifully,” he said.
“Undutifully? Is it one’s duty to one’s father to be silly—to give up one’s power of judging what is wrong and what is right? I am sure, papa, you are much too candid a thinker to suggest that.”
What could he say? He was very angry; but this candid thinker took him quite at unawares. It tickled while it defied him. And he was a very candid thinker, as she said. Perhaps he had been treated illogically in the great crisis of his life; for, as a matter of fact, when an argument was set before him, when it was a good argument, even if it told against him, he would never refuse to acknowledge it. And conscience, perhaps, had said to him on various occasions what his daughter now said. He could bring forward nothing against it. He could only say, I choose it to be so; and this would bear no weight with Constance. “You are not a bad dialectician,” he said. “Where did you learn your logic? Women are not usually strong in that point.”
“Women are said to be just what it pleases men to represent them,” said Constance. “Listen, papa. Frances would not have said that to you that I have just said. But don’t you know that she would have thought it all the same? Because it is quite evident and certain, you know. What did you say the other day of that Italian, that Count something or other, who has the castle there on the hill, and never comes near it from one year’s end to another?”
“That is quite a different matter. There is no reason why he should not spend a part of every year there.”