Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/139

 air over one eye and looking more than usually delicate-featured, and more than ever like an obdurate child.

"She doesn't know."

"She does."

"I can't imagine what makes you fly out against everything like this," said Miss Stanley to her niece.

"What is the good of talking?" said her brother. "She must go her own way. A man's children nowadays are not his own.  That's the fact of the matter.  Their minds are turned against him. . . . Rubbishy novels and pernicious rascals.  We can't even protect them from themselves."

An immense gulf seemed to open between father and daughter as he said these words.

"I don't see," gasped Ann Veronica, "why parents and children . . . shouldn't be friends."

"Friends!" said her father. "When we see you going through disobedience to the devil! Come, Molly, she must go her own way.

I've tried to use my authority. And she defies me. What more is there to be said? She defies me!"

It was extraordinary. Ann Veronica felt suddenly an effect of tremendous pathos; she would have given anything to have been able to frame and make some appeal, some utterance that should bridge this bottomless chasm that had opened between her and her father, and she could find nothing whatever to say that was in the least sincere and appealing.

"Father," she cried, "I have to live!"

He misunderstood her. "That," he said, grimly, with his hand on the door-handle, "must be your own affair, unless you choose to live at Morningside Park."