The shock of his brusqueness restored the lady to her usual quiet composure. Looking up into his face, she found it as blank and impenetrable as a cement wall.
“You must pardon me,” she murmured. “I myself am a Chicago girl, so you must see how natural it is for me to hope that so sweet and beautiful a girl as Chuckie came from my city.”
“Chuckie is my daughter,” stated Knowles in a flat tone.
“If you will kindly permit me to explain. My husband––”
“Chuckie is my daughter, legally adopted,” repeated the cowman. “You can see what she is like. If that is not enough, ma’am, I can’t prevent you from declining our hospitality, though we’d be mighty sorry to have you and your husband leave.”
The tears started into Genevieve’s hazel eyes. “Mr. Knowles! how could you think for a moment that I––that we––”
“Excuse me, ma’am!” he hastened to apologize. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You see, I’m kind of prejudiced along some lines. I’ve been bred up to the Western idea that it isn’t just etiquette to ask about people’s antecedents. Real Western, I 241 mean. Our city folks are nearly as bad as you Easterners over family trees. As if a child isn’t as much descended from its mother’s maternal grandmother as from its father’s paternal grandfather!”
Genevieve smiled at this adroit diversion of the subject by the seemingly simple Westerner, and replied: “My father’s and mother’s parents were farm people. My husband worked his way up out of the Chicago slums.”
“He did?” The cowman could not conceal his astonishment. He looked curiously into the lady’s high-bred face. “Well, now, that sure is something to be right proud of––not that I’d have exactly expected you to think so. If you’ll excuse me, ma’am, I’m more surprised at the way you feel about it than that he was able to do such a big thing.”
“No one is responsible for what he is born. But we are at least partly entitled to the credit or discredit of what we become,” she observed.