Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/126

 easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it."

"Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn't easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his own cigarettes."

"Oliver has to have his little jest."

"Little jest, indeed!" retorted Cornelia almost grimly. "When Dorothy opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, 'No, mother, they are for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.' She opened the box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, 'To my daughter Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,' with a lot of rigmarole warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time! I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the cigarettes and the