“That's so,” said Kedzie. “He's always begging me to name the day. But I don't know what he'd think if I was to tell him I'd been lying to him all this time. He thinks I'm an innocent little girl. I just haven't got the face to tell him I'm an old married woman with a mislaid husband.”
“You mean to give him up, then?” Mrs. Thropp sighed.
Adna raged back: “Give up a billion-dollar man for a fool poet? Not on your tintype!”
Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were getting on sympathetic ground. They understood each other.
Adna was encouraged to say: “If I was you, Kedzie, I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy the feller off. You could probably get him mighty cheap.”
Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's arguments. She scorned this proposal.
“Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd most likely run like a rabbit.”
“Then what am I going to do?” Kedzie whimpered.
There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with “Don't!” for its watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neighborhood gossip, something scathing and ascetic. That delicate balance between failing to mind one's own business and failing to respond to another's need did not bother her—nor did that theory of motherhood which instils courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for life, and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, grace, philanthropy, invention, art, glory.
She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right according to their individualities, or went wrong for any reason soever. The least indiscretions of her own daughters she visited with endless tirades. Kedzie had escaped them for a long while. She had succeeded as far as she had because she had escaped from the most dangerous of all influences—a perniciously repressive mother. She would have been scolded viciously now if it had not been for Dyckman's mighty prestige.