“Thanks to you,” was my gallant reply.
“Thanks to the Cortelyous,” she declared.
“They might have known,” said I, “that we’d never have a public circus to please them.”
“Isn’t it nice,” she responded, “since we had to have a fracas, that it should be between ladies and gentlemen?”
“Isn’t it?” I acceded. “Just supposing there had been some cad concerned, who would have written to the papers and talked to reporters!”
“That was impossible, because we are all Cortelyous,” explained Kate. I like a girl who stands up for her stock.
“Yes,” I assented. “And that’s the one advantage of family rows.”
“I want to tell you,” she went on, “that you do my father a great injustice. Some natures are silent in grief or pain, and some must cry out. Because he talks, merely means that he suffers.”
I longed to quote her remark about leaving her father out of the conversation, but having told her there were no cads in the family, the quotation was unavailable. So I merely observed, “Not knowing Mr. Dabney Cortelyou, I have had no chance to do him justice.”
“But what you hear—” she began, with the proudest of looks; and it really hurt me to have to interrupt her by saying,—