Then she had died, and Edith had come, and things had been different.
The difference had been demonstrated in a dozen ways. Edith was pleasantly affectionate, but she didn’t yield an inch. “Dear Uncle Fred,” she would ask, when they disagreed on matters of manners or morals, or art or athletics, or religion or the lack of it, “isn’t my opinion as good as yours?”
“Apparently my opinion isn’t worth anything.”
“Oh, yes it is—but you must let me have mine.”
Her independence met his rules and broke them. Her frankness of speech came up against his polite reticences and they both said things.
Frederick, of course, blamed Edith when she made him forget his manners. They had, he held, been considered perfect. Edith retorted that they had, perhaps, never been challenged. “It is easy enough, of course, when everybody gives in to you.”
She had brought into his house an atmosphere of modernity which appalled him. She went and came as she pleased, would not be bound by old standards.
“Oh, Uncle Fred,” she would say when he protested, “the war changed things. Women of to-day aren’t sheep.”
“The women of our family,” her uncle would begin, to be stopped by the scornful retort, “Why do you want the women of your family to be different from the others you go with?”
She had him there. His sophistication matched that of the others of his set. Socially he was neither a Puritan nor a Pharisee. It was only under his own roof that he became patriarchal.