“Here,” he smiled. “Why don’t you two greet each other?”
Duer Tibbetts moved jerkily forward and took his cousin’s hand. But the bondage of the room’s authority was strong on him. He seemed weighed down by this sense of special dispensation. Social talk was impossible in the august presence. He was soon gone.
Another five minutes of chat, another knock. This time a girl appeared with papers. The same subdued alertness, the same gingerly respect. Mr. Deane pressed a button. A boy bobbed in.
“Take Miss Deane to her carriage.” The boy fell back as if to flatten himself into the wall, while she passed him. Her father got up.
“Well, my dear. I am afraid I am too busy now”; in this splendid easy manner he dismissed her....
This transfiguration of her father into a man of power was a sharp new knowledge. But in the more persuasive color of her home, its lines grew faint. It soon withdrew into the limbo of things remote, scarce real, hence scarce remembered. It had little application to her world uptown. In consequence, it had no effect.
Lois left school in time for lunch. It was to be her last year at school. The lunches would go on.
Seated at the wide round table with Muriel and her mother, she instinctively inquired into her own future freedom: and in this mood studied them. She studied their dress; she studied their activities. She absorbed their judgments and their pleasures.
She was sixteen. A spirit of gayety and candor danced in her heart. But she had no knowledge to build a mansion for it: to train and cherish it: to give it weapons wherewith to confront the world. It was dancing, this unblemished spirit, dancing itself to death. For it was daughter of the sun, and it breathed no fresh air: it had been born careless and frail and all about it walls of convention: it was starved and forced to feed upon itself.
“I promised to go and have tea with poor Mrs. Dent.”