Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/123

 As the sons, so the daughters.

Mary, who married well and lived in Lancaster Gate, sometimes took the children in a cab to see him; but as her nurse's sister let apartments in the same terrace, she had to look after them herself, and that was too fatiguing for frequent repetition. Kitty, the black sheep of the family, who danced in burlesque, and showed her pretty limbs as Captain of the Guard, and her pretty teeth in her laughing song, stood to him best; but even she was frankly sceptical at mention of the golden book: "Chuck it, dad, and write naughty anecdotes of celebrities for Modern Society or some of the papers; nothing pays like scandal with just a grain of truth. Like some tickets for Thursday? No! Well, buy some baccy." And she would take her rustling petticoats and powdered, laughing face, and saucy eyes, into a hansom with ill-concealed relief.

They had all grown beyond him and his dreams. Their interests were frankly material; they were keenly alive to his faults, his subterfuges, his poor, sometimes mean, shifts to make ends meet; his silly reverence for everything that wore a gown, his wasted talents that might have served their advancement; they resented him as a failure, and they let him know it.

One thing solely they were blind to, Dick as well as Barney (which was the less excusable, seeing how like the chip was to the block), level-headed Mary as easy-going Kitty—that they them selves were the result of the very faults they condemned. Their acute sense of essentials, their world-insight, their calculating fore thought, each of the very qualities that assured their success in the world of their desires was built up on the solid foundation of sordid experience his make-shift life had brought in its wake. His impecuniosity had taught them the value of money, his happy-go-lucky procrastination the need of immediate action; he had been an unconscious object lesson to them from their tenderest