Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/63

 There was a pause. It was broken by my father who seemed now deeply offended. "Did you make any arrangements about going back?"

"I promised to go to-morrow, after breakfast."

"What for?"

"I was asked to take the Dales somewhere."

"Can't they find their own way? It isn't very difficult."

"Does that mean I'm not to go?"

"You can't be always going there. You seem to me to live there."

"It's easier than living at home," I muttered.

"It is pleasanter, I daresay; but I don't want you to make yourself a nuisance to strangers."

"Aren't they the best judges of whether I'm a nuisance or not?"

"Well, I don't wish you to go to-morrow."

"You might have said so sooner," I burst out. "What reason have you?"

"I hope you don't intend to be as disrespectful as you are," my father said slowly. "If I had no other reason for not wanting you to go, I should have a very good one in the way it seems to make you behave when you come back. I have another reason, however: I don't desire you to grow up with an idea that you have nothing to think of in life but your own pleasures. You are quire sufficiently inclined that way as it is."

He spoke quietly, but there was a concentrated feeling behind his words. "What have I been doing?" I asked, trying to be equally calm, though I knew my eyes were bright, my cheeks flushed, and my lips pouting.

"I wasn't alluding to anything particular so much as to your whole way of looking at things. You appear to wish to be absolutely independent, to go out and in just as you please. You appear to think you have no duty to me or to anybody else. You are becoming utterly selfish."