heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be.”      

       He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in possession of the hearth-rug.     

       “Well,” she said, “good-night, father.”      

       “What!” he asked; “not a kiss?”      

       She affected not to hear.     

       The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained standing before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat down and filled his pipe slowly and thoughtfully....     

       “I don’t see what else I could have said,” he remarked.     

  

       CHAPTER THE SECOND     

       ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW     

       Part 1     

       “Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?” asked Constance Widgett.     

       Ann Veronica considered her answer. “I mean to,” she replied.     

       “You are making your dress?”      

       “Such as it is.”      

       They were in the elder Widgett girl’s bedroom; Hetty was laid up, she said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was gossiping away her tedium. It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books—Shaw and Swinburne, Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance Widgett’s abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly remunerative work—stencilling in colors upon rough, white material—at a kitchen table she had   

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