Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/157

 "It is the first time I have had the pleasure of being in your home," Stanway said at last, sitting down and evidently abandoning his quest of bad furniture.

Marjorie ignored that remark, which only admitted his persistent refusal to recognize her father as his equal. "Equal?" she repeated to herself; this pretentious, supercilious incompetent, who was determined to obtain for himself the rewards and honor of work without doing the work himself—indeed, while disdaining to look and act as if he ever worked. He was no equal to her father.

Her father really worked and he was proud of it; he looked like a worker and he wanted to; and she swore with herself that, whatever else happened, this man should not seize for himself what her father had created and earned; not he who dared not himself openly throw the stone of scandal at her father; not he who had first endeavored through Russell—so Felix Rinderfeld at least believed—to ruin her father so that he could put himself in her father's place; not he who was here now to set her mother to his task for him.

"It is impossible for me, I suppose, to step upstairs, while I am waiting, to see your father?" he said, with a slight, dubious rise of his voice.

"Impossible," Marjorie replied quietly, closing her lips firmly and bracing herself with her hands on the sides of her chair. "Did you come here expecting to be able to see him, Mr. Stanway?"

"I have heard, of course, that he is much improved; but I have heard also that his condition was originally much more serious than at first given out."

"It was; what else have you heard, Mr. Stanway?"

He gazed at her, blinked and fingered for his glasses.