"I can hardly realise she's my daughter. I thought she'd come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged."
He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners of his mouth.
"I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind."
He gave an apologetic laugh.
"I had to, you know," he said awkwardly. "I had such an awful hump."
"What's the young man like?" I asked.
"She's awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are about nothing else." There was an odd quaver in his voice. "It's a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you've never even seen. I've got his photograph somewhere, I don't know where it is. I don't think I'd care about him very much."
He helped himself to another whisky. He was tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together.
"Well, thank God, her mother's coming out soon."
I don't think he was quite a normal man after all.