"It's not because I'm a beast," he said, quietly, "that I have no grief for my father. He was through. Life had nothing to offer him. He had nothing to offer life. Don't think I'm incapable of grief. I experienced it the day I thought you might be dead. That was because you had so much to offer life—rather more than life had to offer you."
He saw her shrink from him but she walked on, repressing her pain and her anger.
"Since I've known intimately girls of your class," he said, "I've realized that not all of them would have turned and tried to wound as you did that day. Some would have laughed. Some would have been sorry and sympathetic. I don't think many would have made such a scene."
He smiled down at her.
"I want you to realize it is your own fault. You started this. I'm not scolding. I'm glad you were such a little fury. Otherwise, I might have gone on working for your father or for somebody else's father. But you're to blame for my persistence, so learn to put up with it. As long as I keep the riding crop with which you tried to cut my face I'll remember what I said I'd do, and I'll do it."
She didn't answer, but if she tried to give him the impression she wasn't listening she failed utterly.
Around a curve in the path came a bent, white old man, bundled in a heavy muffler and coat. In one hand he carried a thick cane. The other rested on the arm of a young fellow of the private secretary stamp. There, George acknowledged, advanced the single person with whom a scene might make a serious difference, yet a more compelling thought crept in and overcame his sense of danger. That was the type of man who made wars. That man, indeed, was helping to finance this war. George was obsessed by the dun day: by the leaves, fallen and rotten; by the memory of the oblong box. Everything reminded him that not far away Death marched with a bland, black triumph, greeting science as an ally instead of an enemy.
"Suppose," he mused, "America should get in this thing."
At last she spoke.
"What did you say? Do you see my father?"