Page:Penrod by Booth Tarkington (1914).djvu/221

Rh She did not reply.

He began plaintively, "Margaret, you don't"

"I've never seen papa and mamma so upset about anything," she said, rather primly.

"You mean they're upset about me?"

"We are all very much upset," returned Margaret, more starch in her tone as she remembered not only Penrod's sufferings but a duty she had vowed herself to perform.

"Margaret! You don't"

"Robert," she said firmly and, also, with a rhetorical complexity which breeds a suspicion of pre-rehearsal—"Robert, for the present I can only look at it in one way: when you gave that money to Penrod you put into the hands of an unthinking little child a weapon which might be, and, indeed was, the means of his undoing. Boys are not respon"

"But you saw me give him the dollar, and you didn't"

"Robert!" she checked him with increasing severity. "I am only a woman and not accustomed to thinking everything out on the spur of the moment; but I cannot change my mind. Not now, at least."