dozen ways. Edith was pleasantly affectionate, but she didn’t yield an inch. “Dear Uncle Fred,” she[47] 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?”

[47]

“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.

Yet, as time went on, he learned that Edith’s faults were tempered by her fastidiousness. She[48] did not confuse liberty and license. She neither smoked nor drank. There was about her dancing a fine and stately quality which saved it from sensuousness. Yet when he told her things, there was always that irritating shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, well, I’m not a rowdy,—you know that. But I like to play around.”

[48]

His pride in her grew—in her burnished hair, the burning blue of her eyes, her great beauty, the fineness of her spirit, the integrity of her character.

Yet he sighed with relief when she told him of her engagement to Delafield Simms. He loved her, but none the less he felt the strain of her presence in his establishment. It would be like sinking back into the luxury of a feather bed, to take up the old life where she had entered it.

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