Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/380

 chance to meet her; just shooed 'em away and used to sit all afternoon with her up in a corner of the boat-deck every day. Charlie said he wouldn't even play cards after the first afternoon or two; he was so afraid he'd miss that taity-tait; said it was a perfectly terrible scandal! You wait till I get a chance to twit him about it."

Then, laughing under his breath, he improved this theme; planning an after-dinner discomfiture for Tinker which should be assisted by a pretended severity on the part of Mrs. Tinker; and as he talked jubilantly on, Ogle, standing next to Olivia, was conscious of the increasing rigidity of her attitude. It was his impression that she became frozen with horror and that she was horrified for her father. In spite of his own emotions, which were various and all poignant, Ogle had not failed to notice the hurried anxiety with which she had striven to draw her mother's attention from the street of the dancing girls and to fix it in another direction.

Yet, from the viewpoint of both the girl and her mother, what reason was there for Olivia's anxiety? Ogle understood the marital attitude of the type he thought of as the "Middle Class wife"; but surely even by such a person nothing especially ruinous