"To think of it—Ollie up-stairs working her fingers to the bone to help us out, and Prue dancing her feet off disgracing us! To think that one of our daughters should be so good and one so bad!"
"I can't believe that our little Prue is really bad," Serina sighed.
"Yet girls do go wrong, don't they?" her husband groaned. "This morning's paper prints a sermon about the tango. Reverend Doctor What's-his-name, the famous New York newspaper preacher, tears the whole tango crowd to pieces. He points out that the tango is the cause of the present-day wickedness, the ruin of the home!"
Serina was dismal and terrified, but from force of habit she took the opposite side.
"Oh, they were complaining of divorces long before the tango was ever heard of. That same preacher used to blame them on the bicycle, then on the automobile and the movies. And now it's the tango. It'll be flying-machines next."
Papa was used to fighting with mamma, and he roared with fine leoninity: "Are you defending your daughter's shamelessness? Do you approve of the tango?"
"I've never seen it."
"Then it must be just because you always encourage your children to flout my authority. I never could keep any discipline because you always fought for them, encouraged them to disobey their father, to—to—to—"
She chanted her responses according to the familiar family antipathy antiphony. They talked themselves out eventually; but Prue was not home. Ollie gradually typewrote herself to sleep and Prue was not home. Horace came in from the Y. M. C. A. bowling-alley and went to bed, and Prue was not home.
The old heads nodded. The sentinels slept. At some dimly distant time papa woke with a start and inquired, "Huh?"