Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/291

 She knew then that he meant to be very disagreeable, and she told herself that she would not listen to him; she would think of something else while he was speaking—a trick she had learned long ago. In the drawing-room she sat quietly and waited for him to begin. Standing by the mantelpiece, he appeared more tired and yellow than usual. She knew that he had worked on his book; she knew that he had poured all his vitality, all his being, into it; but as she watched him her imagination again played her the old trick of showing her Michael standing there in his place. . . defiant, a little sulky, and filled with a slow, steady, inexhaustible force.

"It's chiefly about Sybil," he said. "I want her to give up seeing this boy."

"Don't be a martinet, Anson. Nothing was ever gained by it."

(She thought, "They must be almost to Salem by now.") And aloud she added, "You're her father, Anson; why don't you speak?"

"It's better for you. I've no influence with her."

"I have spoken," she said, thinking bitterly that he could never guess what she meant.

"And what's the result? Look at her, going off at this hour of the night. . . ."

She shrugged her shoulders, filled with a warm sense of having outwitted the enemy, for at the moment Anson seemed to her an enemy not only of herself, but of Jean and Sybil, of all that was young and alive in the world.

"Besides," he was saying, "she hasn't proper respect for me . . . her father. Sometimes I think it's the ideas she got from you and from going abroad to school."

"What a nasty thing to say! But if you want the truth, I think it's because you've never been a very good father. Sometimes I've thought you never wanted children. You've never paid much attention to them . . . not even to Jack