"It seems to me that you are the influential person in those quarters," he said, with the smile that Janet privately thought the most delightfully sympathetic she knew.
"Oh, I'm not really!" the girl answered quickly; "and besides—" she hesitated, to pick words that would hurt her as little as possible—"besides, Frida wouldn't care about my doing it."
"Why?"
"I don't know quite why. But she wouldn't—it's of no use. I don't think she likes having things done for her by people anything like her own age, and—and standing."
Cardiff smiled inwardly at this small insincerity. Janet's relation with Elfrida was a growing pleasure to him. He found himself doing little things to enhance it, and fancying himself in some way connected with its initiation.
"But I'm almost certain she would let you do it," his daughter urged.
"In loco parentis," Cardiff smiled, and immediately found that the words left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. "But I'm not at all sure that she could do anything they would take."
"My dear daddy!" cried Janet resentfully. "Wait till she tries! You said yourself that some of those scraps she sent us in Scotland were delicious."
"So they were. She has a curious, prismatic kind of mind—"
"Soul, daddy."