Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/195

Rh it would seem the importance in her life of the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed. But another mood of the old man’s was distrust of anything that could not be spoken of as his “own flesh and blood,” and then he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of his daughter and to schemes for giving her the completest control of all he had to leave her provided she never married nor fell under masculine sway. “After all,” he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life’s ideal, “there was Hetty Green.”

This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe, and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people wouldn’t train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into